Fluid Overload

Rick writes:

3-20-10 Sat. 6 days to heal
Today is the vernal equinox – night and day are the same length.
Reviewing the recent past I found that I carried the tunnel catheter for five months plus a day (10-15-09 to 3-16-10). No wonder it was so hard to extract.

3-22-10 Monday 4
We had a nice weekend with Allysan but her dad had to take her home early yesterday afternoon due to his work schedule.
Today was a trip downtown to Seattle NWKC to meet w/Angela due to a change in her work schedule. Ordinarily she is at SeaTac from Monday to Thursday. Preparing for this visit involved saving up four bags of used dialysate, three yesterday and one this morning, numbering each one in order #1 through #4 and collecting a total of 1100 cc's of urine to deliver to Angela for testing in order to see how effective my home treatment is. Angela emitted a squeak of delight when I delivered this gross offering to her. She's probably the only woman in the world who would welcome such a “gift” with enthusiasm.
Afterward, Mary and I took our usual route home through Alki and picked up our usual lunch of fish and chips along the way.

3-23-10 Tuesday 3
I got a call this morning from Rochelle at the Veteran's Administration. My application for veteran's benefits was received and reviewed and I'm assigned a Group 6 veteran's rating. Official notification of acceptance will arrive in the mail soon and I'll then set up an appointment for an interview.
As a Vietnam vet I'm eligible to apply for compensation for agent orange exposure whether I spent any time ashore or not. To my recollection, the closest I personally ever came was when the ship spent part of a day in Da Nang harbor and I was the utility boat signalman sent out to tow the captain's gig back to the ship when it went dead in the water (Dec. 16, 1967)
After all these months of steady sprinting for doctor's appointments and various surgeries it has been a welcome relief, both physically and financially, to finally adapt to the more relaxed schedule that home dialysis offers. This is the right opportunity to start up with the VA now that things have slowed down a bit.

3-24-10 Wednesday 2 days to heal
Actor Robert Culp passed away today at 79, after taking a fall at his home in the Hollywood Hills.
Bernie Madoff, a financier who made off with billions of dollars from investors and was imprisoned for 150 years, reportedly was beaten up by fellow inmates today or maybe yesterday. Anyway, it's long overdue.

3-25-10 Thursday 1
Life has certainly become simpler since hemodialysis went away. PD comes equipped with its own quirky set of peculiarities though: 1. Dehydration, and 2.fluid overload. I would hope to achieve a happy balance between the two but it turns out to be quite a challenge. I would delighted to experience some dehydration right now but fluid overload (edema) appears to be in the driver's seat. Even though I avoid water as much as I do salt, it accumulates in my tissues every day doing what water does best, i.e, heading for the low spots. By the end of the day my feet and ankles are ballooned out and painful. Going to bed is a sort of relief but the water redistributes itself horizontally and I wake up with swollen hands and wrists. Life has become a repetition of this sequence for this month.

3-26-10 Friday 0 – Tunnel catheter came out 10 days ago. I am now officially healed.
Twenty years ago while I was the sole operator for Heights Water, a new Vashon resident got himself voted in as one of the four trustees of the association. It used to be a joke that the only qualification for eligibility was that they had to have once been a Boeing engineer so it was a strange departure from this unwritten policy that this volunteer had been a marine Engineer all his working life. As such he was endowed with the ME's personal attitude that he knew everything that was to be known in the physical world and was therefore never wrong about anything.
He had an answer for everything in the working world including how long it took to heal up from any given injury in the working world. This was necessary information if you were in charge of the efficient distribution of labor and his assessment of a reasonable length of time for any injury to heal was 10 days. No more; no less. And no exceptions.
He applied this rule to himself when he came down with prostate cancer and this delayed his recovery when I caught him digging up a leak in one of Height's pipes exactly 11 days after his treatment started. This led to a small heart attack which set him back another 10 days but failed to impress upon him the need to allow recuperation to take its course, however long that may be. He went to work on his house with a vengeance after putting it on the market, where it failed to sell. The effort caused a stroke and sure enough, after 10 days he was back to work on the house, which finally sold and he was able to then move off the island into an apartment. With his wife safely housed ashore he put all his affairs in order and died. What a guy! An inspiration to us all.
I am now the keeper of the “10 days to heal” rule. I stripped the pressure dressing off the site where the tunnel catheter used to be. It's not quite healed yet. I'm going to give it more time.