On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, eight University students leave their apartments, take the elevator to the second floor and hook up to a machine that cleans the impurities from their blood.

Four hours later, after the blood is pumped out of their bodies, through a machine 82 times and back into their raised veins, a nurse slips the needles from their arms and notes their vital signs. Usually it's back upstairs for some food and a nap.

Without it they would not be here.

The Dialysis Unit for Penn State University Students serves students with kidney disease and is the only one of its kind in the nation.

But DUPSUS provides much more than hemodialysis machines.

"You can get dialysis just about anywhere else in the country," said Betty Carter, the program's clinical nurse manager. "What you can't get is the rest of the program. It helps them find the focus most people have rather than making the illness the most important thing."

To help them turn their attention away from their disease and back to everyday living, the program supports students in learning to make a living, understanding kidney diseases and developing hobbies, friendships and relationships.

Besides medical treatment, the unit also provides nutritional and physical education programs for University credit. Unlike other University courses, those programs specifically deal with kidney disease concerns, Carter said.

"The coordinator will do anything she can for you," said Davut Yolacan (freshman-provisional), a patient. "It's a good system to have. I appreciate it a lot."

The unit provides all of those services where the students live -- O'Brien Place, 300 S. Pugh St., two blocks from campus.

"I've grown up with the disease with mostly being around older folks, between 30 and 70," said Andy Walker (freshman-division of undergraduate studies), who started dialysis this semester. "It was kind of exciting coming here and being around people my own age."

case of strep throat, Walker now lives with a student who has a transplant and two other dialysis patients. Yolacan, one of those two patients, is also blind from a diabetes-related complication.

And living with other people with kidney disease also provides friends with something in common.

"If you talk to someone else, they might feel sorry for you, but if you talk to your roommate, they're going through the same thing, too," said Frankie Breyer (junior-recreation and parks), Walker's roommate.

For people with working kidneys, a quick trip to the bathroom will rid unwanted substances from the body. But for people like Yolacan and Walker, the body cannot rid the fluid which slightly puffs their eyes and cheeks.

So they go to the unit, which opened in 1985 for counseling and in 1989 for dialysis, to drain their bodies.

The unit's first patient graduated with honors in 3½ years about two years ago. Three students will graduate this spring and another in August.

Legally and financially separate from the University, the unit enlists a liaison to the University to help students secure financial and academic aid.

Though securing financial aid may be a hassle, patients have an easier time paying for dialysis to treat kidney diseases than for many other diseases because the government guarantees financial aid to patients, Carter said.

After dialysis, some patients say that they feel tired from the fluid loss. For some the hangover lasts only an hour, and for others it lasts as long as a day. Sometimes the after-effects depend on the person and sometimes the machine.

"Here, after I get off I am ready to die, well really I'm very worn out," Yolacan said. "It's usually alright until the third hour and then my blood pressure starts dropping and you have to start playing games with the machine."

Even though dialysis takes up about four hours of the patients' time three days a week, and may leave them drained of energy, most say their physical lives are not altered by the treatment.

"Being a dialysis patient doesn't stop you from doing much," Yolacan said. "A lot of people have the impression that you're fragile and sickly, but it's not true."

And people should not treat dialysis patients like they have a disease, said Walker, who bikes regularly on the Penn State Cycling team.

"This is an inconvenience, that's all," Walker said. "I don't even consider it a disease or a disability. Everybody depends on some kind of a machine. So I gotta come in here four hours every other day. That's the only inconvenience."