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Texas native Harvey Wells recently stopped in the Big Apple during a cross-country RV tour recently. Normally, it's a trip that couldn't happen. Wells suffers from kidney disease, which used to keep him in a dialysis center three times a week for four hours at a time, where machines do the work his organs can't.

“Your life is pretty much scheduled around the time you have to do dialysis,” says Wells. “The prospect of spending your life tethered to a machine is pretty depressing.”

But a mobile unit called NxStage is once again allowing him to hit the open road with his family.

An at-home dialysis option is also changing things for busy restaurant owner Steve Olsen. With a machine at his bedside, he can do it in his sleep. Not only are these options keeping both patients out of dialysis centers, its actually allowing them to get more treatment – up to six days a week two-and-a-half hours at a time for Wells, and as long as Olsen sleeps each night.

“On a nocturnal treatment, there's no real diet that you have to adhere to, unlimited fluid consumption, because you are doing so much dialysis – 40 to 48 hours a week – that you feel closer to a normal, living person with normal kidneys than a standard dialysis patient,” says Olsen.

But doctors say while those alternatives and more are available, only a small percentage of patients are choosing them. The reasons could be many, from some patients just physically not being able to do it to others who are reluctant to take their care into their own hands.

“One of the things we as a community of nephrologists have tried to do for years is to get more and more people to dialyze at home. In general people who dialyze at home feel better, they do better, they look better,” says Dr. Jonathan Lorch of the Rogosin Institute at Weill Cornell Medical Center.

“We would expect 40,000 patients to be on this treatment rather than a few thousand, so we need a better awareness of this,” says Dr. Walter Wasser of Life Care Dialysis Center. “We know that treatments are moving out of institutional settings and I think that as the machines become more user-friendly, I think patients are going to become daring enough to try it.”

Wells say being "daring" gives him a chance to live a lifestyle he wasn't sure he'd be able to have again.

“My grandkids can tell you the difference between grandpa now and grandpa then is much different,” says Wells.