The "Allergies or Colds", edition.

Good Wednesday morning. Well. The three of us are doing better today than we were yesterday. Monday evening Brian had a scratchy throat and Dad and I started coughing.   Brian and I opted out of treatment Monday....I'd had treatment on Saturday and Sunday so that was fine. You know I won't ever miss treatment and I won't ever go 2 days in a row without treatment. So. We were able to just rest...and cough...and sneeze..and blow our noses.  And sleep. Brian had the worst of it. Although we were all pretty much wiped out. No one left the house. And Brian slept most of the day. And bless his heart, he wanted to get something for dinner. Dad and I told him soup would be fine. No one had much of an appetite. So we were pretty much OK to do treatment. 

Treatment started out fine.  I cannulated, Brian administered the heparin and epogen. And we were off. We watched the election stuff, then settled in to The Voice.  I was drifting in and out. Then at some point I woke up, feeling slightly nauseous and sorta wanting to go the bathroom. Now doing treatment in the center, unplugging me to go to the bathroom was a non issue. The techs did their thing, I'd go, come back and they'd hook me back up. Of course this wasn't something that didn't happen often....we're encouraged to go to the bathroom before treatment. But we never covered it for home hemodialysis. And I don't see how I can disconnect and reconnect with out breaking sterile connections. I'll ask my nurse next visit.  

So anyway. Before I could tell Brian my problem, I started getting lightheaded. Dammit. I was crashing. My blood pressure dropped.  I got hot and kicked my blanket off. I also told Brian I needed saline.  Hits of saline, salt solution, raises the blood pressure. It's the combination of salt and fluid. Crashing and low blood pressure during treatment can be indicative of removing too much fluid. Brian gave me 300 ml before I settled down. Even still I had a difficult time getting a bp reading. I'd thought it was a problem on how we put the cuff on, but I learned from the nurses and it was demonstrated to me that when that happened, my blood pressure was low and the machine was having a difficult time reading. By time I got a number it was 64/44. :-/  Then. I had the audacity to crash a second time within the half hour!  WTF?  Brian gave me more saline, another 200 ml. I got better..felt better and we were good for the rest of the evening.  Twice during one treatment.  That never happened before. But Brian knew what to do.  Now. You may be asking why did I crash?  And how in the world did I crash twice?  I have an idea. And it's something I did to myself. Also since I had 500 ml of saline returned, I basically negated the fluid removal for this treatment. *sigh*. 

The amount of fluid I need to remove during treatment should be the amount I am over my dry weight. "Dry weight is your weight without the excess fluid that builds up between dialysis treatments. This weight is similar to what a person with normal kidney function would weigh after urinating."  So if my dry weight is 100 kg and prior to treatment I weigh in at 102.1 kg, then 2.1 kg of fluid needs to be removed during treatment. After treatment is finished, there is a process called rinseback. This is were the blood that is still in the tubing and additional saline is returned to me. In center, the rinseback was .5 kg. I think home hemo is .3kg. Anyway. I was trying to take the rinseback into consideration when calculating how much fluid to remove. Apparently my numbers were wrong or I just need to forget about taking the rinseback into consideration. Too much fluid taken off = crashing. I'd rather not. At any rate, I'm gonna hear from my nurse today who will read me the riot act. I brought it on myself. /shame

Anyway. Today is a new day. The coughing has eased up considerably for all 3 of us. Dad has already done his walking and Brian has way more energy. He's got his ceramics class today. I'll ask if he's going to go. That's it for today!  Have a great day. And oh! Its Kidney month. Have you had your kidneys checked within the last 12 months?  You should. If for some reason you end up on dialysis like me, I'll commiserate with you, but you really don't want to end up that way.