Nighty Night

As I sit and type this in bed, the HomeChoice Automated PD System whirrs and pumps away. It's not terribly loud, but it is noticeable, and some patients have trouble sleeping with it. To drown it out a little, I sometimes use a rain noise app. And to eliminate the LCD display's brightness, I go to bed wearing a sleep mask.

I use the machine every night. It gets connected to some bags of solution with dextrose and icodextrin in them, as well as my peritoneal dialysis catheter that I had surgically placed on/in me in December. The machine warms up the solution via the heated cradle and automatically goes through a Drain, Fill and Dwell Cycle every hour and 50 minutes or so, for four cycles, which add up to nine hours total.

Thanks to my rain and thunder app and the eye mask, I usually sleep through it all, only waking up to pee in a portable plastic urinal in the early morning. Every time I pee, I try to remind myself to be thankful that I still have residual kidney function left to still make urine.

There used to be some drain pain, a kind of uncomfortable cramping on the insides. It's much better these days, but I used to have to sit up and adjust positions and clench my teeth to fight it, it hurt pretty awfully.

It's late and I'm sleepy. Next time, I'll talk about the nightly preparation ritual to get connected to the machine. I also realize I need to cover more of the progression of my CKD, from Stage 3 to Stage 5. That will be another blog post. Thanks for going along with the non-chronological nature  of this.