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.