My days in Dialysis

You would think an old woman living in a retirement home, where she did not have to cook, do dishes, or clean house, would have all the time in the World.  Not so.  I am as stressed for time as my children with their high-powered jobs. 

Three days a week have disappeared.  On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday I go to dialysis.  I get up in the morning, go down to breakfast, wave my arms around in exercise class, and return to the apartment at 9:00 a.m., when I make my bed, water flowers on the patio, and straighten up the apartment, hoping to get the chores done by 10:45, when I go downstairs to eat lunch before leaving for dialysis at 1l:30. 

I must eat before going to dialysis, as the process takes protein out of my blood along with the poisons.  To restore protein, I eat again as soon as I get home at 4:00 p.m.   Then I collapse.  Dialysis leaves me exhausted.  I sit in the recliner and feel sorry for myself until time for bed. 

In an article in The New Yorker I found a doctor’s description of the dialysis process.  Elif Batuman describes patients “reclining on white chaises, as blood was pumped into and out of their bodies through tubes.  The place where the two catheters punctured the forearm was marked on each patient by an irregular, discolored potato-sized fistula, surgically created by connecting a vein and an artery.  The fistula made me think for the first time about how much blood has to leave the body during dialysis: not a liter or two but all of it, several times over, to the extent that blood vessels have to be hot-wired in order to get it in and out.  Each patient’s blood passed through a long plastic tube and around a slowly turning wheel, which pumped the blood through the machine.” :

Doris’s son was on dialysis for ten years.  He stopped treatments and died four days later.  Eloise’s daughter also stopped taking dialysis.  She lasted for a week.   Both were young, in their 30's..

I am 84 years old.   I have had an unusual and interesting life.  I am going to die within the next few years, one way or another.  Okay.  Until then, I will continue dialysis.   I enjoy life four days a week.