The "Planet Fitness is the Hook Up Joint for Senior Citizens", edition.

Yes indeedy. I've been watching the "mature" adults checking each other out at Planet Fitness. My favorite was the lady strolling around in her Jane  Fonda workout outfit. Leg warmers and all. The other ladies pretty much broke their necks when they saw her walking past. The fellas "appeared" to not pay any attention. Brian nudged me when I chuckled. 

On the flip side, Brian is one of two men in water aerobics. Heh. He came out of the locker room before me. When I came out and he greeted me, all the ladies backed off. Lol Brian's  fan club. So anyway. You're wondering what kind of schedule do we have?  Monday, Wednesday and Friday morning we have water aerobics. The problem is, this is not deep water aerobics and seems a bit tame. The next time we went, the instructor gave us (me and Brian) stronger resistance implements. Well  we felt the workouts after that!  Lol. She also teaches deep water aerobics at another facility. We will enroll for the next session. 

We are also taking water color class at UNLV. I can officially state I have absolutely no talent. BUT. I am learning techniques so I should get better. Eventually. Lol. Those classes are Wednesday evenings. Tuesday mornings we went back to acrylic class. This is the most entertaining of all the classes. I have no talent for acrylic painting  either.  Lol. And I get much messier. I like it!  Brian has signed us up for a knife skills class and we are investigating a few cooking classes. And we go to Planet Fitness on Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. This is the result of doing home dialysis.  We do it in the evenings on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. Better outcomes, better labs. More energy. So glad I went for this option.  We're also looking at trips to visit the kid, of course, but going to Seattle. 

The flip side is I don't seem to have time for the blog. Well I make time. It's looking like once a week. I'll figure it out. Today I have to go to the dialysis center for a doctos appointment and to replenish some of the supplies. The supplies for the dialysis machine will arrive on March 2. It will be a box-a-poluzza again!  Also, the Stratosphere has free entry to the top for "locals" this week, so we're going to go today. I think there's a soul festival downtown this weekend, so we'll check it out. And sorority meeting is next weekend. We also have to go on a Girl Scout cookie hunt. :-)

Finally, we found several of Mom's photo albums. I've been posting #TBT photos on facebook. I'll have them here, also. One is from the kid's 2nd birthday. It was a little party with just family. The photo is my niece, my mom and the kid. My aunt, the kid's godmother and I think my mother-in-law is in the photo also.  The 2nd photo is taken a few (!) years later. My how they've grown. Both young ladies are self suffient, gorgeous and in grad school. Can you say proud moms, grandmother and aunts?  And dads , grandfathers and uncles?  :-)

Well that's it. February is ending as the warmest February in Las Vegas, ever. Just think, I was in Michigan  last year for the snowiest year ever.  Have a great weekend.  Oh yeah,mother Medicare situation seems to be working out. I'll update you soon. 

The "It's Been Just Over Six Months Since We Left Detroit", edition.

Can you believe it?  Only six months. It seems much longer as we've settled in.  And I mean much longer in a good way!  Well first let me describe our winter experience. The last 2-3 weeks have been unseasonably warm out here. And make no mistake, we're loving it. However, it did get pretty cool by late November. Morning temps would be in the high 30s, low 40s and I was prepared.  I was heading to dialysis at 4:30 AM, before the sun came up and it was chilly. Yes, I know, chilly, not cold. But still. I realized in October that the wool coat I brought with me was going to be overkill. Hey!  I got rid of all of my boots and the rest of my winter coats before I moved. I thought I might need the winter coat. Well not this winter. 

I purchased a lightly lined jacket. I did need a hat so I purchased one and somehow I had left a pair of gloves in the car when it was shipped to Las Vegas. And I used them. I also got a pair of "fashion" boots that eventually got too warm to wear. ;-(  But once I didn't need to get up and out so early, all I needed was a warm cardigan. And now?  People are wearing shorts, tank tops and flip flops. I'm still in jeans, but the warm weather tops have made an appearance, along with my sandals. Now hear me out. A fair amount of buildings we go to still have the heat on and it gets rather warm inside.  So anyway, my wool coat and jacket and boots and hat and gloves are looking forlorn right.  I'm not giving up the wool coat yet, though. And I feel weird wearing summer wear in February, but not that weird. Lol. 

Valentine's Day was actually was a weekend. I don't remember much of what we did on Friday.   I did walk the treadmill mile. Saturday Dad and his friend went to see old friends and they had a great time. Brian and I had Valentine's lunch at Red Lobster. When it came to pay the bill, we were informed that a gentleman who had already left, paid our bill for us!!!!!!!!!!!!!  I've heard about things like that. We were taken aback. And quite grateful. The waitress got a generous tip and now we will be paying it forward very soon. We then headed to Henderson to a bakery because I wanted a brownie. 

Ok ok. I hear you saying, "Pat!!!! You know what chocolate does to your labs. That'll raise your phosphourus and then you'll be bitching about how the dietician starts talking to you like your in kindergarten. Well you might be correct but.....  Since I started home dialysis a few things have happened. My blood pressure has stabilized. I haven't taken any hypertension meds in about 3 weeks. My average BP is now around 120/80. That hasn't happened in decades!  And my phosphourus numbers?  The range for people on dialysis is 3.0.to 5.5.  And I want to state that my nephrologist suggested that I will probably stop taking the binders that help keep the levels low.  So anyway. My phosphourus level went from 5.6  to 3.0!!!!!!!!!!!!  I'd do backflips if I could. I clearly didn't expect such a dramatic drop so quickly !! And let me tell you. Because of the cost of the phosphourus binders, I hit the Medicare  doughnut hole in February. How much the cost you ask?  Over $1800 a month. It pisses me off the write about it, to think about it. 

And let me digress for a moment. Yes, I have to pay $1800 a month for the phosphourus binders and almost $500 for a drug to control my parathyroid....when I'm in the Medicare doughnut hole.  See, when I was covered under Brian's policy, the cost was split and covered between Blue Cross and Medicare. But I want to thank the City of Detroit, The State of Michgam and the emergency manger for ending the health insurance plans for retirees and making everyone go the the health care marketplace. Brian had to get a policy through the marketplace and I am totally ineligible because I'm on Medicare. And oh yeah, I'm now responsible for 20% copay on all medical costs. Yay me?  This shit costs a lot of money. So if you or anybody starts bitching about entitlements be prepared for me to slap the crap out of through your computer screen. Because I worked hard and made a decent salary, I'm not eligible foradditional  assistance to help cover the costs. And the f---nig city wants to take $60k from me for the clawback. 

Oooweeee.   Rant over.  Breathe Pat, breathe. It does me no good to get upset.  The doughnut hole will close soon because of the high cost of the drugs and I'll go into the catostrophic category and the copay becomes reasonable again. And Nevada is the experimental state for a Special Needs Medicare Advantage program. I'm signing up.  Lol. Apparently I was one of the first people to get involved. So there is a light at the end of the tunnel. And oh yeah. Because I don't have that secondary insurance, I'm suspended on the transplant list. I want to offer my hearty thanks to the City of Detroti. Fuck you. 

Lol. Hmmm I went off script. I made Bang Bang shrimp for dinner on Saturday. It was delicious!  I also fixed rice. I sautéed some onions, used chicken broth instead of water, flavored it with a little chicken bullion. When it was finished I added fresh parsley. Yum o yum!  Yesterday Dad treated us to brunch at Red Rock Resort. After we finished we gambled for about 20 minutes. I played a machine I'd never played before and the all the reels spin to WILD. That, my friends, is called hitting the jackpot!  lol. 

Still warm today. Going up to 78. The weather people are upset because the record won't be broken, but there have been 13 straight days of over 70 and the average temp for this time of year is 63. No complaints from us!  We haven't turned on the air conditioning, but the open window feels really good. 

Stay warm, have a wonderful day and consider visiting us out here.  The hotel rooms are cheap!  

The "I Think We're Hitting Our Stride", edition.

We've successfully switched to evening treatment. The nice thing about HHD is we can adjust times if needed. If we have an evening engagement, we'll just do the treatment earlier in the day. I'm liking the evening, though. It seems to go faster. Like watching the Grammys while dialyzing. Made the dialysis seem to go faster. :)  It'll go even faster now that our water system has passed the test. This means that instead of Brian having to hang 6 giant bags of dialysate every treatment, we can make our own every 2-3 days. It shortens the time considerably. And it eases up the need for a lot of storage. 

Those bags Brian is hanging are the dialysate bags. "Dialysate consists of purified water and various substances dissolved in it. With the exception of glucose, the substances dissolved in the dialysate are all electrolytes. Their concentration (besides potassium and the buffer substance) closely resembles the concentration of the electrolytes occurring naturally in the blood. Dialysate regulates the electrolyte and acid-base balance of the dialysis patient and removes waste products." 

We've been getting new and exciting alarms, but we've solved them without having to call the nurse trainers. Well once we did. After going over all the solutions and the alarm continued. We called the nurse and she had me readjust my my venous needle (venous=returning the blood back to me). Somehow the needle moved and wasn't moving the blood. One of the ways she determined that was the problem was to have Brian disconnect the tubing and attach a syringe (no needle). If there is resistance while plunging the syringe, there is a problem.  And he encountered resistance.  So I readjusted the needle and voila!  Problem solved. 

Sunday evening we had low venous pressure.  This one was cause by me leaning on the tubing. Once it was moved there were no more issues. And darned if we didn't get low venous pressure again last night. This time I moved my arm. Problem solved. The machine is sensitive to almost every little thing. And that's NOT a bad thing. :)  

So I know you want to know. How is sticking myself going?  Well it's going pretty good. Because I can feel the blood flow in my arm, I know where to insert the needles. I feel for the throbbing near the access site and that determines the angle for the insert. I know the stick is good because I get a "flashback" of blood on the tubing. 

 The bottom needle is the blunt tipped needle I use, but the the tubing just after the "butterfly"? That's where the "flashback" appears. Not a lot of blood but just enough to know that I've struck gold. ;)  I'll talk about what comes after this another time.  Oh yeah, the tube is is about 12-18 inches long. 

Finally, Las Vegas isn't very pedestrian friendly. It seems a pedestrian is hit and killed at least once a week. Well, this past week 3 were killed, 2 were children. Part of the problem is the city blocks are ridicolously long. On some streets the traffic lights Nd the blocks may be up to 1/2 mile apart and the speed limit is 45 mph. And the streets may be up to 8 lanes. As a driver we need to watch for idiot drivers and dashing pedestrians. Ah well. Anyway. We're doing fine. Trying to figure out what to do for Valentines Day.  Thinking about House of Blues which is serving a lobster thermador (never had it). The entire meal is $60 for 2. That's actually a nice deal.   We'll see. :)  Oh yeah. The news people are are chuckling. It's unseasonably warm here. They compare that to Boston has had a snow fall of 73 feet and its 73 degrees here. They have no shame (nor should they!  Lol). I'm loving every minute of it. I wore sandals yesterday.  ;-)  and it's actually closer to 78-80 degrees here. 

The "Adjusting to Change...But That's What Life Is", edition.

Good morning!  I'm liking these sunrises out here. We're still adjusting to change. Can you believe that we've been out here only 6 months? Last year this time we were looking at our house and trying to figure out how in the world are we ever going to make this move? So much stuff in this house. During that time we made 2 trips to Illinois, lost my precious Jade, repaired a hole (a hole!) in my front porch. Participated in the National Kidney Foundation walkathon. Packed four generations of china.  Moved 5000 photos to CDs.  Went to a presentation for home hemodialysis (aha!).  I continued to go to dialysis every Monday, Wednesday and Friday during all of this. I have never missed a treatment. Ever. Which means I've dialyzed in Champaign and Springfield, Illinois. We sold the house..and all of the hoops and paperwork that involved. 

Change. We moved from a 3600 square foot house to a 1500 square foot apartment. We've remodeled the apartment. And finally...I've moved to Home Hemodialysis. You'd think I'd have enough of change. Well no. It's time for a trip!  Lol. I need to wait a while, per my HHD trainers. They want us to  do some more sessions of home dialysis before we set off, but with this HHD setup, traveling just became a whole lot easier!  I can take my dialysis machine (cycler) with me. I don't need to make arrangements at foreign dialysis centers and have strangers sticking me. Woot!!!  I digress. 

We're still trying to figure out a schedule. We thought we'd maintain the early morning schedule. What's been happening is after we finish treatment we go back to sleep. That sort of defeats the purpose.  We're going to try having treatment just before going to bed. What I have to do is to transition to it.  What I mean is for the next several days, my treatment will be later and later until we get to our target time. Oh yeah. I'm dialyzing 5 days a week, but I'm never off for more than a day. Our schedule, for now, is Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. Or the free days are Wednesday and Saturday. 

Change. So the blog schedule is changed. Eventually I'll figure out publication days. But it's not MWF anymore. That evolved because those were my incenter dialysis days. And the music kept me occupied. All of that has changed. However, I'm still having my adventures in dialysis!  Like on Monday. Monday was blood draw day. We only did it once while in training. So we were on our own on Monday. It didn't go quite as planned. Lol. And that's an understatement. We ended up calling the trainer who talked us through an "alternate method" of drawing the blood.  

Here's the thing. The blood is drawn through the tubing of the needles after I've inserted the needles. Once I've inserted the needles, my blood isn't flowing.  The blood flow is resumed when I'm connected to the dialysis machine. During that no blood flow time, clots can and do form. Clots are bad for all kinds of reasons. Like gunking up the machine. So time is of the essence. I'm not sure how long the blood draw actually took, but it was a while. I'm tempted to say 10 minutes, but thankfully no clots formed. As time goes by, we'll get more proficient. But again, a month ago we never thought we could do this!  

Also during the (difficult) blood draw, the machine was complaining. It seemed as is all the possible alarms went off. Lol. What the machine was saying is the "circle is not complete". Or I'm waiting for the blood to start flowing and it isn't happening..do something!!!  Once I was connected the machine relaxed and the treatment was uneventful. Lol. More to come on process, procedure and alarms of cycler. 

Finally we went to our 2nd watercolor class last night. It's at UNLV and we're leanring a lot of techniques. I think 3 hours is a bit much, but I'm sure I'll adjust. What I've learned is I have absolutely no talent whatsoever. Lol lol But I'm enjoying the class.  Maybe I'll post some of our artwork. You'll be able to see how Brian and I paint the same thing but how different we see the subject. Hint: I'm heavy handed with the paint. 

And. No we haven't been to the new White Castle. Yes, it's unseasonably warm here. No, I'm not missing winter.  At all. I really, really miss having a dog. And Brian has talked me into taking a knife class. Wooo!!  Have a great day. Stay warm. And if you have too much winter, Vegas is really a cheap trip!  :)

Random pic of me and the Easter Bunny!  

The "Training is Over! I'm Dialyzing at Home!", edition.

Home dialysis. That's what I'm doing. This changes everything!  Well not everything. I still need to dialyze. But my routine...our routine has changed. And it happened so quickly. Wow. January 2, I was greeted at my center with the news I start home hemo training (HHD) on January 5. The last info I had was I'd start on January 9. Anyway. On Monday the fifth of January Brian and I trekked across town..and I do mean across town to the training center. Well I should back track a little. On January 2 as we were leaving the clini c I get a call. The HHD training people wanted to drop by the apartment for an assessment. The got there about an hour after we arrived back home. I recall being beat and tired because it was, after all, a dialysis day and I'd just finished treatment. Two people showed up and did a walk through of the apartment. I could barely stand while they did the assessment. They were satisfied and told us they'd see us Monday at the center at 9:00 AM. 

The center was near Smoke Ranch Road and Tenaya Road.  Lol. I had no clue where that was. I recall seeing Smoke Ranch but I had no clue where. Glad I have Google Maps. lol. 13 miles. Ah. I've been near there though. There's a DSW store nearby lol. Of course I'd find the DSW in Vegas !  The clinic was a different from the others I'd been to. It was pretty snazzy...for a dialysis clinic. The in center clinic was on one side of the building, the training area was on another side. In addition the clinic offer nocturnal hemodialysis. I'll tell you about that one day. 

We go in and see our our nurse trainer ms he leads us to a room that would be "our" room for the duration of the training. I was accustomed to being in and out of dialysis by 8:30 - 9:00 AM. Now we were starting at 9:00. We had to adjust. But what this mean was our days were just off kilter. We'd get out of training around 1:00 PM. Anyway. The first day, the nurse introduced us to the cycler (the HHD machine) and pretty much did everything. Day 2 everything changed!!  She started making us do stuff. Including having me stick myself. That in itself was a non event. Imagine that. 

As the weeks went on, we got more proficient...or rather I should say Brian got more proficient. So much so they were ready to send us home after 3 weeks. Yeah, so saying that made me and Brian look like deer caught in headlights!  Just as well. I had an drop in blood pressure episode just before the end of the 3rd week. Brian had never seen that happen. The good news is I feel it coming on. The nurse gave me saline fluid and showed Brian and me how to do give the fluid. She also pointed out that we could anticipate the blood pressure drop and avoid the crashing. I take my BP every 1/2 hour and it was dropping. At that point Brian can decrease the flow before I bottom out. 

There's so much to go over but I'll leave you with this. During those 4 weeks of training, I dialyzed 5 days a week for 4 weeks. Because of daily fluid removal, my blood pressure has stabilized. I no longer take blood pressure medication.  Unless I want to pass out. And I don't. The nephrologist told me that the phosphourus level should drop I'll no longer need to take the phosphourus binders. I really like that. The cost of those meds are listed as $2000 out of pocket. !!!!!!!!!! :-(   I mean I never have to pay that, but the Medicare Part D doughnut isn't pleasant at all. 

I need to figure out my music on dialysis since I'm at home. I have so much more to occupy me as opposed to the clinic mans I'm not on as long.  We'll figure it out. Well I need to go. Brian is setting up the cycler and I need to weigh and set up my station. Oh. And sorry about all that snow in Detroit. Going up to 70 here. I'd say neener neener, but I'm not that mean!  Love Ya!  ;-D

Photos of me on cycler and photo of in center dialysis machine.