Diabetes and Dialysis #6
The time has come.
Got notified by the kidney doctor yesterday that my little honey moon period is over. I am slated to go to the hospital next Thursday to get a catheter dialysis access installed and they will give me two more units of whole blood then give me a short (2 hour) dialysis treatment. That will be followed on Friday by the second treatment which will be closer to the normal four hours.
The week following I will start my three days a week on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.
I was hoping to hold out until my AV fistula had matured and be available for use. But that is not to be.
Although this has been expected for the past 8 weeks, there is now the fear that comes from it no longer being somewhere in my future. It is now part of my present and will be for the rest of my life.
There have been folks asking me what caused my kidneys to fail. While it is hard to nail it down to one single factor I would have to say that it was the cellulitis that I got in my left leg in 2007. It ended up going septic and shut my kidneys down. I was in ICU for a week and nearly died.
There was also long term ibuprophen use due to old sports injuries. The doctors prescribed it before the dangers to the kidneys were known. But I was also never questioned by any doctor until I saw the nephrologist in the hospital with that infection. That ended my ibuprophen use.
I also have high blood pressure but that was caught and treated pretty early.
Last of all is T2 diabetes. I have no doubt that I was diabetic long before the diagnosis.
There was also a rather nasty kidney infection that I had when we lived in North Carolina. It went on for over a year before it was caught on a pre-employment physical by the company I worked for in New Jersey. Now there was a doctor that was a dope. Every time I would go to his office complaining about back pain he said the same thing; “Could be somethin’. Could be nothin’”. Take more ibuprophen.
But none of that matters now. Whatever caused the failure is irrelevant. Now I just need to get the truth out of someone because I am hearing two different stories.
I went to tour the dialysis center where I will get my regular treatments and was told that I would start dialysis with a stay in the hospital. I talked with the nephrologist and he tells me that I will go into the hospital and get the catheter put in, get dialysis and then go home. Go back to the hospital the next day and get the second dialysis session and then go to the center for my regular schedule.
Well those two stories don’t match. All I can do right now is pre-plan for at least an overnight stay in the hospital next week and roll with the punches.
Thanks to all for reading my journey. I now have an Ipad that I got to pass the time in the dialysis center so I will try to blog what goes on next week.