LINCOLN – As a dialysis patient for the last four years, resident Joyce Chesley has known the frustration of having entire days consumed by treatment.

Three days a week, Chesley made the hour-long trip – sometimes longer in the snow – to Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor to be hooked up to a machine for four hours so her blood could be cleaned of toxins.

“I’m down there almost as much as I’m up here,” Chesley said of the 10-hour trips. “The bottom line is that dialysis patients don’t have a life because they’re too busy getting treatment.”

Fortunately, Chesley is about to have more time on her hands. In four months, when the new Lincoln Lakes Regional Dialysis unit is completed on the Penobscot Valley Hospital campus, her trip will be shortened to a mere five minutes. And that’s not to mention the $300 she will save each month in transportation costs.

“I just can’t imagine it right now,” Chesley said. “I couldn’t have asked for a better Christmas present than what I’m getting this year.”

Chesley was one of nearly 50 people on hand Wednesday for the center’s groundbreaking on the hill behind PVH. Once it’s operational, the center will house six stations and have the capacity to provide treatment for 22 stable, chronic hemodialysis patients from Lincoln to Patten to Danforth. New patients will still need to make the initial visit or visits to EMMC.

Besides its 15-station unit in Bangor, EMMC maintains a 12-station unit in Ellsworth and helped develop a nine-station unit in 1997 at The Aroostook Medical Center in Presque Isle.

Only minutes after Wednesday’s crowd moved indoors, a front-end loader was lifting mounds of earth and brush to clear the land that will house the center. With oversight by Northeast Nephrology PA of Bangor, the dialysis center will be supervised by current EMMC nursing management.