It's Wednesday night, which means tomorrow is garbage day. Garbage pick up - there's something I could cancel, but it would cost about the same to haul the garbage to the dump ourselves, and we'd have to do the heavy lifting, so maybe I'll keep that service.
Anyway, we'll put the garbage out tomorrow. Hope we remember first thing in the morning.
Rick goes to see Dr. Oliver tomorrow. Dr. Oliver is his nephrologist. We like her - she's caring, and compassionate, and encouraging, and a good doctor as well. She knows her kidneys.
Things have not been great on the dialysis front these last few weeks. Rick continues to go to hemodialysis, and tomorrow we'll talk about whether he can go back to doing peritoneal dialysis at home.
It turns out that his compact, wiry little body works against him in peritoneal dialysis. His organs are packed so tightly that they tend to flatten the catheter inside of him and prevent him from draining dialysate as well as he is supposed to, or as is optimal for using this method. Consistent draining is a requirement of the over night cycler, which is looking less and less like an option. He tends to drain eventually - but not immediately. The worst part of that is that he develops edema.
Having to stay with hemodialysis would be a bummer, on the one hand. He has to drive into Seattle three days a week and watch his blood get sucked out, filtered through a machine, and then pumped back into him, and he's tired out by the process. On the other hand, there is the big plus: he gets to stay alive.
This is the trade-off of kidney failure in our time and place. You have to have dialysis or a kidney transplant to survive. Those are the choices.
Rick hopes to return to peritoneal dialysis, anyway. Discussing that is going to be a big part of our meeting with Dr. Oliver tomorrow. That, and his persistent cough.
Stay tuned.
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