By Muhammed El-Hasan


At work, Leigh-Ann Eichelkraut often finds herself knee-deep in blood – figuratively speaking.

Eichelkraut, 37, serves as a patient care technician at a DaVita dialysis center in Torrance.

The Harbor City resident has worked for the El Segundo-based dialysis firm for the past five years, with the past year at the Torrance location.

Eichelkraut looked into this field after hearing about it from neighbors. She started working for the company after eight weeks of training from DaVita. Before joining DaVita, Eichelkraut spent five years as office manager for a hospital psychiatric unit.

What is dialysis?

It’s needed when kidneys don’t process and break down the waste in your body. So a patient’s blood is sent through a machine called a dialyzer. The dialyzer cleans the blood and sends it back into the patient’s body.

What does your job entail?

When the patients come in, we do their initial assessment, which is blood pressure, temperature, pulse and pre-weight. We assess if their access is working.

What’s their access?

It’s the point at which we pull blood out of them and put it back into the arterial blood chamber. Most start with a catheter in the chest, a temporary situation. Then they will have a surgical procedure to put a tube in their arm. And if their veins and arteries are big enough, a fistula (a specially created vein in the forearm that draws and returns blood to the patient) is put in.

What happens after you check the access?

Then we hook them up and start the treatment to pull the blood and send it through the dialyzer. We maintain them every half-hour with tests for blood pressure and pulse and the pressures in the dialyzer itself. We maintain how many liters of blood is dialyzed every half hour. We want to visually make sure everything is working well. Once the treatment is over, we disconnect the needles.

How often do patients come in?

Generally, it’s three days a week. Some people come in five or six days a week.

How long is each session?

The process takes about three and a half to four and a half hours. It depends on their lab work, which we do every week. There’s more in-depth lab work once a month.

Do you get to know patients on a personal level?

We talk to them a lot, and we know what they do on the weekends and we know about their kids. Some of them don’t have a lot of family, so we’re like their family for them to talk to and ask questions.

What’s the best part of your job?

Seeing patients recover. Helping them through treatment if they’re having a bad day. Sometimes they cramp and we can help them.

What’s the most challenging part of your job?

When patients get sick. It’s hard to deal with, especially when they die.

How many hours do you work?

We’re here 12 and a half to 13 hours a day, and it can be tiring depending on who your patients are.

What do you do with anxious patients?

We try to talk them through the situation. There’s a patient who’s absolutely terrified by needles. We usually have one person try to occupy her and the other will stick in the needle. Certainly, if they’re anxious, it’s because of the needles because it does hurt.

Do you dream about your job or take your work home with you?

Occasionally if something goes wrong, I’ll look back on it and try to think of how I could have done it better. But I try to keep my work and home separate. Otherwise, it consumes you.

Are your afraid of blood?

No. Negative, captain. You can’t be afraid of blood.

What are your career plans?

I’m starting school in January to become an RN (registered nurse). I will stay in dialysis. I think this is the most rewarding of the medical fields because you get more interaction with the patient.

What do nurses do here?

The nurses here do different assessments. They listen to the patient’s lungs for fluid. They drain and dispense medications for patients. They do a lot of the charting and paperwork.

What have you learned from your patients?

There’s such a diversity of patients here. I’ve learned how people from different countries or different parts of this country live. You just have to be open-minded.

What advice do you have for people interested in entering this field?

The No. 1 thing is you have to be compassionate with people.

Do patients sleep during treatment?

Most of the time they do.

Do they snore?

Yes, they do.

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