Kidney girl wants to be like other teens

Priyashna Kumar spends four hours every Monday, Wednesday and Friday hooked up to a kidney dialysis machine.

All Priyashna Kumar wants to do is live a normal life and go to school like others her age.

Instead the 13-year-old spends four hours three times a week hooked up to a kidney dialysis machine.

Priyashna arrived from Fiji in June last year and was later diagnosed with end-stage kidney failure. Since August she has made the trips to a dialysis centre in Greenlane, at a cost of $874 each time.

Her aunty Praveen Lata, who is trying to donate her a kidney, said because Priyashna was on a visitors visa she did not qualify for publicly funded health care. With the price of dialysis already too costly, the money needed for the transplant was well out of the family's range.

Priyashna Kumar spends four hours every Monday, Wednesday and Friday hooked up to a kidney dialysis machine.

Ms Lata, a critical care nurse at Auckland City Hospital, said she understood the debate that existed around non-New Zealand residents and citizens getting publicly funded healthcare, and said she accepted the argument against it. But she thought, in this situation, it was fair for her niece to get some help from the public.

Ms Lata is a citizen. Priyashna's father and sister are still in Fiji with no support network, she said, and her mother was no longer around.

The family are raising money via a Givealittle page for the transplant, and as of last night it had reached $4700. The target is $130,000 - the amount Ms Lata said it will cost for the two surgeries and associated medical costs.

To donate visit: givealittle.co.nz/cause/priya.