Mayor Bill Welch looks at the Hamilton watch his parents gave him some 35 years ago when he graduated from State College Area High School. Friday 4:44 p.m. --only two minutes left.

"Not that I'm counting," the 52-year-old said with a grin.

Two minutes until the end of his last dialysis treatment at Centre Community Hospital. Two minutes until the nurse disconnects him from the machine that has kept him alive for almost 10 months.

"I've never been troubled by that at all," Welch said. "I'm grateful the machine is here to keep me alive."

Since April 1993, the machine has done the work his kidneys were meant to do. But after today, Welch hopes he will never need the treatment again. He will receive a kidney from his 24-year-old daughter Jessica Welch (senior-Spanish) at the University's Hershey Medical Center today.

Bill Welch said his kidney failure, known as end-stage renal disease was probably brought on by a number of things.

"I think I've congenitally formed smaller kidneys," he explained while being dialyzed Friday. "But I also have a history of high blood pressure."

Welch underwent what should be his final dialysis treatment yesterday at the medical center. During treatment, the machine removes blood through a needle in his left arm at 300 cubic centimeters -- or about one cup -- per minute and pumps it into numerous porous plastic bags that are surrounded by a dialysate solution.

Betty Carter, a registered nurse in Centre Community Hospital's dialysis unit said the microscopic holes in the plastic bags are too small for the red and white blood cells to squeeze through. But nutrient molecules, such as potassium, calcium and phosphorus, can pass through it easily.

"(The treatment) removes waste products that the kidneys don't," Carter said. "It's that simple."

Using osmosis, the natural tendency of a system to reach equilibrium, the blood-nutrient concentration balances itself with the nutrients in the dialysate solution bath. This bath is a combination of sodium, calcium, potassium, magnesium, chloride, acetate, dextrose and water that is prepared at the hospital.

Usually this lowers the concentration of molecules in the blood and increases the concentration in the solution until they reach equilibrium. The clean blood is mixed with saline solution and passed back into the body through a separate needle.

Welch said it will take three to four hours for one doctor to remove the good kidney from his daughter and another three to four hours for a second doctor to transplant it.

Welch's nephrologist, or kidney specialist, Dr. Jonathan Dranov, said the kidney won't physically replace the mayor's existing kidneys. Instead, the surgeon will insert the organ into the pelvic area.

"You just can't suspend it in the same place (as the old kidneys)," Dranov said. "You just can't hang it up. It's not like clothes."

Although Welch will receive a new, functioning organ, he also gets to keep his old kidneys.

"They'll continue to shrink up and scar up," Dranov said. "They'll just wither."

But because of its location the new kidney may be more susceptible to external trauma.

"It will probably have significantly less protection," he said.

Welch said it will probably take four to six weeks for him to fully recover.

"By all accounts, people who get a kidney get a tremendous surge of energy," he said. "One of the symptoms of kidney failure is lack of energy. And getting that surge of clean blood to the brain -- much more energy, much more energized -- which I'm looking forward to."