Dialysis dynamo 'a hero'

Paul Harris became an inspiration to people with kidney disease across the country when, at the age of 83, he learned to manage his life-sustaining treatment at home and let others know about it

By: Gillian Brown

Paul Harris was always looking for a way to help someone else.

He found a big one while helping himself late in life, and became an inspiration to countless others in the process.

The 92-year-old great-grandfather, who traded punches with chronic kidney disease for more than a decade, died June 21.

"That’s just the person he was," says daughter Lesley Rooney, the youngest of his four children.

Her father was 81 when he was told his kidneys were functioning at 10 per cent and that he’d need hemodialysis to stay alive. No one thought he’d still be alive to celebrate his 92nd birthday.

A couple years after that grim diagnosis, the Manitoba Renal Program director paid him a visit in his room at St. Boniface Hospital, mistaking him for someone else with the same name.

"My dad being my dad, he said, ‘Tell me about this program. I’m not who you think I am, but tell me anyways,’" Lesley recalls, adding the visit got him on a list to participate in a then-new Seven Oaks General Hospital program enabling patients to do dialysis treatment at home.

Months later, having overcome doubts about his ability to self-administer the treatment at his age, he was conducting home dialysis like a business: ordering supplies, sending tests to the lab and arranging for equipment maintenance, when it was necessary. He ran "Harris Dialysis" until he was 90.

That part was easy; he was able to draw on his years of experience as the owner of Supreme Electric.

In 1928, a year after he was born, Harris and his family moved to Saskatchewan from Xenia, Ohio. Then it was on to Winnipeg, where his father worked for CN Rail.

After the Second World War, Harris followed in his father’s tracks and got a railway job before moving on to work as a lab tech for Imperial Oil and then Furnaceman, where he established the company’s used-equipment arm. It was after that when he became his own boss, making electric heating coils and other equipment at Supreme.

When his grandchildren asked about his childhood in the North End, he told them that he was happy. Winnipeg’s Black community was small and his family did experience some racism from some in the neighbourhood, but "nothing that he let mar his childhood," Lesley says.

"Driving through the North End and downtown with him was like stepping right back into the 1930s and ‘40s," his granddaughter Alexandra Rooney said in his eulogy.

No stranger to adversity, Harris fought for those he loved. In 1952, he married the love of his life, Joyce Bottle, during a time when interracial marriages, while permitted, were frowned upon by large segments of society. It would not have been possible back in his Ohio birthplace, where such unions were illegal at the time.

"Despite those challenges, they chose each other, and continued to do so every day for 67 years," Alexandra told mourners.

Paul and Joyce began their family with Jeff, followed by Marcia, Michael and Lesley. There are now eight grandchildren and six great-grandchildren, with one more on the way in December.

Because he hadn’t earned a post-secondary degree himself, Harris wanted better for the rest of the family, Lesley says.

"He worked hard to raise four good people and that he did," she says, recalling meal times being family times.

"I remember all six of us around the table, and mom and dad would just talk about their day.

"I always admired that, because I think sometimes in marriages, you stop talking. You see all different kinds of relationships, but they would always sit around the kitchen table, and have tea and talk to each other."

Joyce died June 22, 2019, one day short of a year earlier than her husband.

After her father died, Lesley found a perfectly organized binder of memories that he’d kept.

It held everything he got from his grandchildren and great-grandchildren, every Christmas card, birthday card, certificate and letter, along with every toast, speech and eulogy he wrote.

She also found friendly correspondence her father exchanged with American singer, songwriter and actor Frankie Laine, and the replies he received after sending sympathy cards to the families of Robert Kennedy, Henry Ford and Jack Benny after their deaths.

Lesley said that above all, Paul wanted to be good to people, even those he had never met.

"He was always finding a cause, and that was what kept him going."

Paul became the organizer and vice-president of the Citizens for Crime Awareness Committee and the president of the Eager Beavers Seniors Club in the Elmwood-East Kildonan area.

He was a member of the Elmwood/St. Vital Branch of public speaking, and was the vice-president of the entertainment committee at the apartment complex where he and Joyce lived after their return from Lester Beach in 2007 because of health issues.

He and Joyce had moved to the family’s cottage to live full time in 1999, something he said was "the best decision they ever made," and where happiness was spending time with family and friends and enjoying a stiff rum and Coke.

His compassion carried with him all the way through his hemodialysis journey, and he became an ambassador for the Kidney Foundation of Canada.

"Mr. Harris was a kind and caring gentleman," says Manitoba branch executive director Val Dunphy. "He was deeply concerned for other who also battled chronic kidney disease. He bravely and graciously shared his personal stories locally and nationally, inspiring thousands.

"Paul Harris was an inspiration and a hero."

Lesley says that her father wanted to share his story, and he told her if he could help one or two people, he would have done his job.

"He wanted people to know that you can do this, and dialysis doesn’t have to be the end of the road," she says, adding the at-home hemodialysis program extended her father’s quality of life; allowing him to continue to create memories with his family and friends, spend more time with his wife and do more good for the community around him.

Lesley believes his message would have been, "If he can do it at 83, anybody can do it, and it could change your life in the most positive way."

gillian.brown@freepress.mb.ca