MCALLEN - A fire forced a clinic to find new places for treatment for more than 100 Rio Grande Valley dialysis patients.

CHANNEL 5 NEWS spoke with the regional operations director of U.S. Renal Care, Ryan Alicaya. He said the fire left their treatment room unusable.

“So, right now we cannot treat. We have about 144 patients over there, and at that time of the fire we were scheduled to treat 72 of them,” he said.

Dialysis treatment needs to be done several times a week with each session lasting at least a couple of hours. For those undergoing treatment, losing a clinic can be critical and life threatening.

The clinic has been working since Monday to find a new clinic for their patients. While searching for other clinics, Alicaya said most of the clinics nearby were either near or at capacity, except for one in Mission.

“Right now our patients are coming over here because this is the only clinic that can accommodate the volume of patients that we have,” he said.

The clinic was recently built and is not near capacity. Alicaya said with the added number of patients from his clinic, the one in Mission will have to be open six days out of the week.

The cause of the fire is still under investigation.

The director said they hope to have the clinic repaired within the next four months.