For my first blog, I want to say that I started PD just a little over a month ago. I knew that dialysis was coming and I had made my choice to use fluid exchange instead of blood exchange(hemodialyis) to cleanse my body, no one ever explained just how much disruption it could cause in my life.
First there was the simple operation to create a catheter-an operation that took one afternoon and in which I also gained part of a hemodialysis access point-a fistula. Pain.
Two days later, the pain increasing and my ability to breathe decreasing, I end up in the hospital with aspiration pneumonia( meaning that I breathed something in that wasn't air and most likely was liquid) That meant an emergency reversal of the closed peritoneal catheter in my my belly-an incision that was supposed to heal for a minimum of two weeks instead was reopened and used within 2 days, as my kidneys failed.
I was starting to have trouble formulating my thoughts and speaking from kidney failure-like I would look at a word and not be able to remember what it stood for- never mind what it was-such as, what is coffee? Do I like this this-eat his-drink this? Also I was so drowsy and un-wakeable that I would be seeing in my mind's eye images of people and places long gone and forgotten and I just couldn't wake up-like a nightmare that goes on and on-only you know it can't be real and you can't be there physically. Most of my memory returned after only about a week of dialysis-I did feel better. And no, dialysis doesn't hurt. But filling and draining the liquid into your abdomen sometimes does
. At first, while I used small amounts of liquid(about 500 cc) I could still feel a sloshing when I filled my abdomen and when the fluid( saline and sugar water) moved with my movement, my stomach would rebel and return whatever contents were left from the previous meal.
I have insulin dependent diabetes type 1, the kind that always requires insulin. I have lots of complications from 40 years of diabetes, for which I wear an insulin pump.
In the beginning-for about 2 days after I got out of the hospital, I did manual exchanges-where an IV bag is hung from a pole and another laid on the ground in a closed system-fluids are drained from your body into the spare bag by gravity and the remaining fluid from the IV bag on the pole is then drained into your abdomen.
Still in the same week,, I moved on to APD,(automatic peritoneal dialysis) a type of peritoneal dialysis where you are dependent on a machine called a cycler-to do your exchanges-the fills and drains of dialysis for hours each night.
A lot of learning from the kidney center that I go to-and I was still confused from not having kidneys that work properly, so it made absorbing new material hard.
