Kidney dialysis

Ever since May 2004 I have been on kidney hemodialysis. I usually go Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, but this time it was yesterday, Saturday. I was sick on Friday so I called up the Charge Nurse at the Kidney Center and she found another slot open; the next day, Saturday at 11 a.m. That gave me a chance to possibly recover. I stayed in bed most of the day.

You see, my wife was ill so I made chicken soup. I boiled a whole chicken, deboned it and threw all the meat back in the pot after straining it with a fork to get out the stalks of thyme. After adding the sauteed celery, carrots and onions according to the recipe, I cooked it together for another 10 minutes or so at a boil. I made the mistake of eating a bowl of soup myself before letting it cool and skimming the fat off the top. My innards apparently couldn’t take it. It also could have been more flavorful. I don’t make chicken soup that often. I can still add spices to round off the taste. It’s not bad with more salt and pepper and whatever is good to put in chicken soup. Fortunately, my wife didn’t sample it yet. I finally brought it to another boil and put it in jars. It cooled overnight.

I tried to eat a small bowl of cereal in the morning but my digestion rebelled so I fed the rest to 2-year-old Nolan Michael. Let Mikey eat it, he eats anything. Later in the morning I had a bowl of my chicken soup sans the fat. Yes, it could use a little help in the seasoning. But I felt better.

But that incident brought me to dialysis a day later than normal, but the routine was the same. I came in, got weighed and assigned to a chair. My dry weight is 86 kilos (189.2 lbs.). Since my kidneys are on the fritz the fluid buildup in my system usually increases to as high as 6 to 9 lbs. over, to about 90 kilos, a couple times it was even higher. Dialysis will bring the weight down to the dry weight. By experience I can’t take more than 4 kilos off so if I weigh more than that I’ll have the rest taken off next treatment. Lately I haven’t even gained that much, and yesterday was a rarity. Since I hadn’t eaten all day Friday I didn’t gain an ounce. In fact, I came under my dry weight by almost a pound. They compensated for that by giving me extra fluid, but I ended up well under my dry weight anyway at the end of the treatment. That’s not too good if it goes too low. Dialysis is by default a weight gain/weight loss exercise, in addition to taking out toxins and other impurities from your blood.

After you’re weighed, and they take your temperature, you sit in a nice comfortable chair for the next few hours—four in my case. The nurse checks your breathing, sometimes checks your legs for signs of swelling, and asks if you had any falls or bleeding. If so, they change the procedure a little (they'll avoid giving you a dose of blood thinner), but normally a technician will cannulate (stick with a dialysis needle--a cannula) with two needles, an arterial and a venous needle and lines, and hook them to the machine and start it up. Then you just relax, fall asleep if you’re so inclined, watch television, read a book, talk with any friend within talking distance, or just stare into space. The choice is yours. If you have questions there are nurses and technicians to answer them, and a doctor in charge who examines the lab reports on a regular basis.

There’s one serious caveat in the whole procedure. Make sure you’re dressed about the same every time when you’re weighed. Early on I was ignorant of some of the procedure and it was a cold day. I was dressed in long underwear and a vest jacket, and got weighed in that way. Big mistake! And nobody caught it. About an hour before the end of my treatment I suddenly felt ill and I started getting these awful leg cramps. I told the nurse and while they were discussing it I felt faint. Between cramps and fainting I would vote for fainting. Before they were able to put saline fluid back into my system I did faint—at least for a few seconds. I revived and everything gradually came back to normal. I felt absolutely wonderful, but oh the hell of it while it was happening! My weight had been heavier than normal due to the extra clothes and they were attempting to bring me down to the posted dry weight. The body can’t take that much fluid loss without ill effects—not for me anyway. That’s one lesson you learn in dialysis. Later I weighed the clothes that I put on for colder weather and found it to be .7 kilos or 1.54 lbs. Not much, but enough to make a big difference.

The initial fear of dialysis can be alleviated by talking to doctors and nurses. They give you a whole gamut of material on the subject. But first you have to be prepped ahead of time. It was almost a year before that I had a fistula put into my arm. That’s how long it took for my kidneys to fail to the point of the need for dialysis. A surgeon surgically joins a vein and artery together and the result is an access that can last quite a while with care, even years. It’s the only working kidney you got at that point.

This information is meant to educate from my own experience. If you don’t want the experience, make sure you take good care of your kidneys. Drink plenty of water, eat proper food, stay away from alcohol—you know the routine. It will most likely save your life. Dialysis saves mine. I’m on fluid restriction. I shouldn’t ingest too much calcium, potassium, or phosphorus which restricts my food intake too. There are renal diets to follow. After all, in this life you can’t do everything you darn please and hope to get away with it. Things don’t always work that way.

I was born with a condition which compromised the kidneys with chronic pyelonephritis, reflux, kidney stones, surgeries and lithotripsies. The kidneys can only take so much abuse.