Dialysis 101

This morning I went for another round of dialysis. I have a 4 hour stint down there. Thankfully I had at least gotten breakfast before I left.

Those nurses there are such a blessing to me. They smile and are happy and cheerful when they see me. I appreciate what they do for me. They're patient and kind to me.

One girl in the Hemodialysis unit is a young mom of 3, Victoria. She is Russian. I look forward to seeing her when I go down there. When I first get into the unit they make me comfortable in the bed and start cleaning off the leads to the port so they can hook me up to my artificial kidney.

For some reason it was difficult for Victoria to get the port to work correctly. I could tell she was a little upset that it wouldn't work but she kept trying different things. I quietly said a prayer that God would let those things work right and thanks to Him and Victoria she got the things going.

Two of my renal doctors were down there today too. I love these men for taking such good care of me. Pray for them too...Dr. Wall and Dr. Rinnir. They are really concerned for me and keep telling me to "Think Urine". As soon as I was done today I needed to pee so that was a good sign. They said that they're not planning on doing dialysis on me again...they're confident that in the next day or so that my kidneys will start working on their own. That would be SWELL!

One thing I learned today is that not only can the machine filter your blood and clean the blood but it also has the ability to suck off extra fluid from your body. Today they drained an additional 3 liters of fluid off my body...that's 1 1/2 Coke bottles of fluid! Come on kidneys....kick in there!

Still no rheumatology consult but I will be asking about that today. I need to get the rheumatological issues dealt with as well.

The blood docs say that my blood has stabilized...not gotten worse and slowly getting better. It's nice to know that I'm not in danger of bleeding to death.

Speaking of bleeding to death...no word about where the blood is coming from but they are thinking it's a freakish period. DUH...I'm the Interesting Patient remember!