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! :)
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