Bad News
My abdominal cavity is such a mess from that nasty, massive, bloody polycystic kidney that used to be there that peritoneal dialysis may be riskier for me than for others. If I am interested in doing it, I may need to wait six months or so for scar tissue to heal.
Good News
I found some episodes of 30 Rock from Season 1 that I hadn’t seen.
Here’s some more photographic evidence of how hard it will be to evict the pets from the bedroom. Well, I’m posting them more for the novelty of the similar themes of the photos taken 13½ years part.
October 1997
February 2011
I’m still awaiting on the actual photos of my removed polycystic kidney. But I have had enough weigh-ins at dialysis now to guess that my kidney had weighed 8-10 pounds. I’m 11 pounds lighter than I was back on January 18. I’ll attribute the other pound or two to a decreased appetite post-surgery. (Before surgery, I was about 10 pounds lighter than I had been a year earlier and about 20 pounds less than my peak weight.)
I’m posting a photo of myself because I genuinely feel like I look better now than what I’ve seen the mirror over the past couple of years. Comments off, because I’m not looking for validation. This instance of self-validation is fragile enough. (And peritoneal dialysis is supposed to put weight on you, what with the peritoneum carrying around an extra couple liters of sugar water…)
In order to go peritoneal dialysis AND not introduce a considerable risk of infection, I need to close off the bedroom from the pets. They wouldn’t just have to be out overnight while I did my transfers with the machine. The bedroom would be off-limits 24/7. And I’d need to be entombed in my bedroom for 9 hours a night. See, the door is never closed to my bedroom. Close that door, and I feel cut off.
I’ve got some time to mull this over. I’ll see if I can make the bedroom-access restriction gradual for the pets.
Last night, they were banished from around 11pm until 5am.
My one model for implementing something similar was when, back in 2002 or so, I stopped letting the cats go outside, cold turkey. This seems like a horrible restriction for cats, mostly Aremid, who loved the outdoors. But they adjusted. I read that cats adjust to however the scope of their domain changes. Even if their domain radically shrinks, they compensate by focusing on whatever domain is available to them.
Mostly, it’s having Aremid right next to me for THOUSANDS of nights that is so difficult to get past.
Aremid as Healer
(January 2011)
I’m going to move forward with a plan to switch from in-center hemodialysis to home, nighttime peritoneal dialysis. More details to follow. I’m optimistic about this right now. I wonder how many times I’ve used the word optimistic in this blog when it was not preceded by not.
bullcitydave 