Busy September Saturday

F I haven't even mentioned that it is September. Where does the time go?!? It's almost Fall and all this Covid mess started in Spring. I actually went into our Credit Union for the first time in more than six months. Woody usually does the errand to the Credit Union but today I added it in with my grocery shopping errand. So saying that I haven't been isn't saying a lot...just that Woody usually does it. They have added some new fangled drive-up Windows and I didn't want to give them a try so decided to do the "go inside" route. Have to get used to the circles on the floor and the plexiglass around the teller stations. I got all our grocery shopping done for the next two weeks. Got them all out away after getting home. Made a quick trip to the pharmacy to get Woody's elusive blood pressure prescription...finally it was there when I tried to get it! It took three tries, but now he has it...thanks to our dialysis nurse. He took it upon himself to see that it got faxed to the pharmacy. After I got back from the pharmacy, I got busy making a new recipe: a dialysis recipe: Chili Cornbread Casserole. Woody really wanted chili, but liquids are supposedly limited when on dialysis (still haven't talked to a nutritionist...so took it upon myself to look around and find some recipes that fit the bill). This recipe is from the Fresenius website...so maybe they approve of it?!? It is made with a very thick chili...not much liquid added. That is the bottom layer of the casserole. There is supposed to be a layer of cheese which Woody nixed as he DOESN'T like cheese (I can't imagine not liking cheese!). Then the top is a cornbread batter poured over the top. It really was tasty and I made sure that the chili flavor was pretty much just like "my" chili. Woody said that it was okay...he said that he REALLY liked the chili part. I know...he just wants a big bowl of my usual chili! This particular recipe is packed with protein...something that I am trying to get into him one way or another! If his appetite would just pick up and if only food just sounded good to him again! Last night's dialysis treatment went okay...not great...as there were a lot of slow drain alerts during the drain cycle. I had to be sure to be there during the drain time as Woody was so sound asleep that he couldn't hear the beeps. I told him tonight if it happens that much again, he will have to wake up and move around a bit to get the draining going better! We'll see if he remembers when I try to wake him up! The slow drain times made for a longer overall time for this treatment. Tonight's photo shows the cassette...not what I picture a cassette looking like...what about you? This is a one time use item that has all the tubing needed to connect everything. The two circles at the top are part of the pump process. The red clamp goes to the bag that is being heated, the white clamps go to the other bags of which we only use one nor do we use the green clamp line. The yellow clamp is the drain line. And, the blue clamp is the patient line. Got all that?!? The patient line has an extra long length of tubing which lets the patient be able to get up and move around and not have to be right next to the machine. On that note, I guess I will go down and start gathering supplies. I can start doing quite a few of the steps at any time prior to Woody's dialysis treatment. I like doing a few things and then do a few more a little later and not do them all at once. The cassette in the photo is laying on top of the two bags of solution...each bag is 5 liters...he gets 2.5 liters pumped into him in each cycle and goes through a total of 4 cycles in a little more than 8 hours...more "if" the drain s l o w s way down! Be safe! Be well! Be cautious as you go about this Labor Day weekend!

More Smooth Sailing!

Some times we can't see the whole picture...as something is just around the bend or over the hill...or in this photo...just around the mown portion of the field and behind what is growing! You get just a hint of the barn, but it satisfied our desire to capture what we could see of it. That is sort of like what is going on with us now...can't get the whole picture and what we see only in part. All WILL get clearer over time! I am finding out my explanations may lack in completeness! Back to the AC having to be off...that is only while I am connecting him and disconnecting him. I have turned on the air for a little before we get going on connecting him...that way I haven't been as hot. Today we got rid of another box. FedEx picked up the faulty dialysis cycler and whether it gets back to its home is questionable. There was no return label. But the driver took it anyway. She said that they had paid for it to be picked up so she figured that someone could figure out where It should be sent! Last night's treatment went very smoothly. There were only to rather quiet beeps telling us that the drain was going slow. I uncurled the tubing and shifted it around and then it started draining properly again. Woody never woke up for the alarm or me messing with the machine. I think as time goes on I will be able to trust the machine! I will say that getting him connected last night went more smoothly than the night before. Maybe one of these days I will feel very comfortable with all the procedures and rules! Our dialysis nur called today checking on us. I was glad to be able to report good news this time! He was supposed to get Woody's one blood pressure med phoned into the pharmacy...and I remembered to check just as it was closing. I will get it for him tomorrow. Woody still feels rather sick at times. He didn't make it through his whole supper tonight before he was sick. i hope that is over with for tonight. All is quiet at the moment! I will head down and gather up all the supplies and start getting things ready. It is easier for me if I do the gathering piecemeal a while before I have to do the actual steps...though the gathering is part of the steps. But it is nice to have those done. We also have to take his vitals prior to the treatment and then again in the morning after it is over. I made him some sweet and nutty protein bars this morning...a Fresenius Kidney Center recipe that I found on the Internet. He needs more protein while doing this type of dialysis and also more potassium. This method tends to pull off good things as well as bad things during the process. He rather liked the protein bars...even asked for another after he was done. Well, off to gather supplies! Be safe! Be well! Be cautious! Melany said that a class of second graders and their teacher have had to go on quarantine because a child tested positive. The bad thing is that he came back to school after he was tested so exposed everyone for another two days before he got a positive test! Melany is his art teacher...hopefully she didn't have close enough contact with him! And, the Covid19 saga goes on and on and...

Finally, cont.

I lost my cursor on my last sentence so will finish in a new blog. I was saying that it will be cold in the room in winter because we won't be able to run the heat while setting him how! My poor little cold fingers may not be able to work in the cold! Or maybe all the glove changing will keep them warm!?! I just had to go downstairs. Woody is feeling sick again...not good as we head into the start of the dialysis. Hope his tummy will settle down in the next half hour! Hopefully it will be smooth sailing again tonight! Be safe! Be well! Be cautious!

FINALLY!!!!

At last I can say that we managed to get in a full dialysis treatments! I think that the machine was faulty to begin with and then the cassette malfunction just put it over the edge! Anyway, the new machine seems to be working fine. There was only one alarm. It happened during one of the drain times. It just told us that he was draining slowly. Woody slept through the alarm so I had to get him wake up enough to shift around and I checked the drain line to make sure that there were no kinks in it etc. Then I pushed "ok" and he started draining again and no more alerts sounded. I figured about how much time till the next drain and set an alarm as the drain times seem to cause us thermoset problems. One of the times I came down to check, the drain time was already finished. When I came down this morning just prior to him finishing, I found him sitting in his recliner...he has enough tubing that he can move about and not be tethered too closely to the machine and cart. I thought that it had been a good sign to find him sitting up, but it was that he had been sick. He said that he thinks he got sick because S abdomen was so full. I'll address that with our dialysis nurse. There are still lots of questions to discuss with the dialysis nurse and his kidney doctor AND the nutritionist. From start to finish last night it took 11 hours. About an hour of that is me just going through all the set-up procedures. I feel that that time will go down once I am more familiar with the routine! Maybe? Hopefully! The procedure for getting him disconnected is much less time consuming. I asked him how he felt today and he said that at first he felt very weak, but after he took his new B-12 vitamins that he felt like he had more energy...the pharmacist had said that they would help him. We both slept off and on during the day today. Our bodies have to get used to this new routine. I think that we will both sleep better once we get through several treatments that aren't problematic! Eventually this will become very routine...we hope! We are two boxes less today. After two treatments we empty two boxes...since we use two different strength of the solution. Nathan and I put tonight's solution bags on the card table in the family room and Nathan took two empty boxes off the stack. Nathan also packaged up the old, faulty machine so it can be picked up. I was told that it would be picked up tomorrow...when I have no idea...so guess that I am tied to the house till they come...if they come! Oh, I want to explain about having no air on when we are getting him connected...it is not because Woody is cold, it is one of the "rules" that I have been given...no open doors, windows, no fans or AC going...in other words no moving air in the room to stir up germs. The warmth is enough to up my speed for getting him connected! It was pointed out to me that we will be cold when it is winter

What Are the Odds? Part 2

This little cat bird is watching for another very important delivery! My question is "what are the odds of your dialysis machine malfunctioning on the second night that you try to do home dialysis?!? Well, in our case I think that odds aren't even a factor any more! Everything went smoothly getting Woody set up last night. It took about an hour to get everything up and going...hopefully that time will go down over time! Getting on the gloves takes up quite a bit of my time...and gloves are changed multiple times! Anyway...we got underway about 9:30 and in less than fifteen minutes things were at a standstill...alarms going off once again. The first fill had started and I picked up all the dropped pieces of paper that come off the tubing and threw them away and headed into the kitchen to put some more dishes into the dishwasher before running it. I hadn't even gotten to the sink before the warning beeps started going off. Went to see what the message was and it told me that I needed to reposition the solution bag over the heater sensor and to check that the clamps were open. The solution bag was where it was supposed to be...but I shifted it some and checked all the clamps and they were open. So pushed OK to try again. Within moments the same message was on the screen. I moved the bag a couple more times...wondering as it was exactly where I usually put it. After making 4 attempts to"fix the problem" and I got the phone and called the tech folk...right number the first time tonight! I explained what was going on and what had happened to us the night before. As soon as she heard that there had been water inside the machine after the malfunction of the cassette, she said that they would overnight us a new machine...supposed to be here by 8pm tonight in time for his next dialysis treatment. So the little bird in the photo above is keeping his eye out for the delivery. I have Nathan on call to help lift it and then get the flash drive and modem plugged in. Supposedly that is all we have to do to have Woody's info in the machine. I won't hold my breath that any of this will actually occur. We can continue to say that Woody still has never had a full dialysis treatment. Monday night he got a 1/4 of a treatment and last night 0 treatment. I called our nurse this morning...as we are instructed to do if a treatment can't be completed. He said that we could wait till tonight's treatment. I was glad as I just couldn't face having to do a manual treatment so soon in our dialysis adventure. Just received a call that our new machine will be here in 10 or 15 minutes! So maybe we will be good to go for tonight! BUT I will not hold my breath! Be safe! Be well! Be Cautious!

Two Blogs for the Price of One Today!

I think that I will let the pictures be worth a thousand words for this blog. A little explanation as to what you are seeing once they got put in my living room. The boxes that are in front of the door that goes under the stairs are all the extra supplies. Those have been out elsewhere so we can get in that door...under the stairs houses the kids toys...rarely used these days and also the water heater...I know...not a good place for a water heater, but I didn't choose where it is situated...the house came that way! The boxes along the "stair" wall are all solutions for manual dialysis. That stack got higher as some of the boxes in front of the under the stairs closet were for manual dialysis. We only do manual dialysis in case of power outage or if the machine has a problem...and the way things have been going that may happen next!!! our nurse will ask us to do a manual exchange every so often so we will know how to do dialysis that way when it is necessary. There is now a stack of boxes on the fireplace hearth and the rest of the things are on the shelves of the closet in the family room. Everything is put away or in stacks of like items. The gentleman who delivered was very helpful. He came from south of Birmingham. We were his last delivery. I just got finished gong through e one box of miscellaneous supplies and got them out away. One item is missing...the gloves. I have some from when Woody was having at home IV antibiotics...but I don't like them! They are flimsier than the ones they use at the dialysis center. Hopefully I will get some after I report them missing. I guess when I get done here I will go down and eat a bite of supper...all this sort of takes your appetite away! Then I will begin once again doing what we get to do every night as long as this method works. Here's hoping that tonight goes better than last night...surely the odds are against the cassette being faulty again! At least tonight if we experience the same problem we will cry "uncle" sooner and just do the manual drain and be done with it for the night. Praying that tonight he will get his first complete dialysis treatment and that we will get more sleep than we did last night! Be safe! Be well! Be cautious! Oh...and...there were more boxes than they said...there were 60 boxes of just one solution. I should have counted...but just too tired to mess with that detail!

What Are the Odds?!?

This roadside art, that we see along one of our byways on our barn trips, is a little the way I feel this morning! I decided that perhaps today deserved to be a two-blog day! One covering our last night "experience" and another covering our BIG delivery this afternoon. Last night was interesting to say a the least. It was fairly quiet till around 1am. Woody slept peacefully for a while...during a fill and then a dwell time. The drain time was what started the problems. The first drain took a very long time and he kept getting the message that it was draining too slowly. He wiggled and jiggled and stood and sat and bent and...you get the picture, at least slightly. Finally enough drained that the cycler machine went on to the next fill...no problem, then the dwell...no problem...then the next drain...the same problem as the first except s l o w e r! We gots bells and alarms and warnings, etc.n we kept trying to make him drain...but to no avail. So I decided that it looked like we would have to do a manual drain. Thank goodness I asked the nurse for one at the training yesterday! I had a couple of questions and wanted to check to see if the 24/7 nurse could help me. I know that I started out to call the nurse phone number, but in looking away at the phone and then back, I plugged in a different number. I didn't find out till later that it was then "disaster" phone number...for folk at time of hurricanes, tornados, floods, etc. The young lady who helped me never indicated that I had called the wrong number. She just took me through some steps that might make the drain work better. I tried them all to no avail. At the end of our conversation she said that if we didn't get to a certain number in a certain time then perhaps the manual drain was the answer. I then asked her the question that I had about the manual drain and she said she could only answer cycler machine questions...which made me wonder why a nurse couldn't address either. But still thought that I had called the nurse phone number. So then I went about getting things ready to do the manual drain and Woody kept trying to get more to drain. He was concerned that it was a problem with his catheter. I still hadn't had my manual drain question answered, but I finally figured it out on my own. I continued to get him disconnected from the cycler machine and connected to the manual drain bag. When I unplugged things then the alarm really started sounding and it wouldn't stop with the stop button. So I decided to call the nurse number back...but I should have realized that this time I needed tech support. Hard to think straight under the circumstances of alarms and figuring everything out for the first time on our own! Anyway, the nurse did answer my question about getting the machine shut down and alarm off, but she did tell me that I should call the tech line next time! Yes, mam! She was nice about it and very helpful...just getting that alarm off helped a lot! From there we got the drain bag connected to the extension on Woody's catheter and opened clamps and drain he did! That took a while but no where as long as we had already taken to "try" to drain with the machine. In those moments I couldn't remember the reason that we had to do a manual drain during training. When I finally got the cassette door to unlatch, I remembered...when water came spilling out. We had had a faulty cassette during the training...so what are the odds that we would have another one on our very first night of doing dialysis at home on our own?!? The nurse told us that he had hardly ever had that happen! Oh, well, I guess we are special! At least we got through it, but he still hasn't had a complete dialysis treatment as he only got one bag of solution instead of two. Woody decided that he wanted some juice before he went to bed (5am by this time!), but I guess that was a mistake. Shortly after he got it down it all came back up...so more to clean up. So far today I have done three loads of wash...a quilt that was on the couch for his bedding, lots of towels (both from the leak and Woody getting sick), and a few clothes. I have had to try to clean and dry out the remote that got in the way...oops! So far it isn't working. I had papers and notebooks lined up on the kitchen counters drying out from the water that came out of the machine and "dripped" on them because they were on the shelf under the machine on the cart. As Woody finally was ready to get a coule of hours of sleep, he looked at me and smiled and said, "And,not think we get to do this all over again tonight!" And, it wasn't in a complaining way! My comment was, "Are we having fun yet?" I tried to go back to sleep, but never did...so running on adrenaline until I crash! The BIG delivery is due sometime between noon and 4...so not sure when I will doze...maybe sitting in the chair here in the living room??? I have also called the dialysis nurse, we have been working with, to let him know what wild readings he would be getting. He had planned to call us at 9am to find out.l.i beat him. His reaction was sort of unbelief and sorry that we hadn't and a better experience. He did say that I at least knew that it wasn't something I had done or not done to make the problem happen. I guess those are comforting words! Well, the delivery person for Fresenius just called and he is 30 min away. Off to get our masks. I'll blog later if I can still put one foot in front of the other...of it I can even walk through my house!