Skip to main content

Dialysis: will cure what ales you

It is a rare day that I am eager to get to dialysis, but today is one of those days: I am hungover. Having felt fine earlier this morning, I now have the shakes and a hint of nausea, compounded by dizziness and the general malaise associated with mild alcohol poisoning.

During the worst hangovers of my university days, I often lay prone, moaning softly, and lusted after the ability to somehow clean out my system and rapidly expel all the murky toxins. Dialysis, take a bow. In a couple of hours, my blood will be filtered, cleaned and returned to me; I will feel as though I never had a drink and be thinner and healthier as well.

It's all Andy's fault. He bought the bottle of wine home to accompany the stir-fry I made (of which half ended up on the floor) and after a couple of glasses it made sense to finish off the vodka from last weekend. It was Andy, too, who suggested just going out for a quiet drink to cap the night off...one turned into four and we stumbled back in - after stopping at the petrol station for Pringles and a Bounty - around 2 am.

That is why today I feel like I am composed entirely of fluid. I am Fluid Girl. I can feel the fluid pressing against the inside of my legs. I feel like a water-bed. I feel dirty inside with all the alcoholic poison I can't excrete. All the mucky fluid I drank last night is just hanging out inside me, making lost-distance calls and eating my expensive cheese. Mocking me.

I shall practically be running to the hospital today, with a pit-stop at M&S to stock up sandwiches. I'll be begging them to ram those needles in and get started and cure me of this God-awful sensation. It makes me wonder how I ever survived pre-dialysis and whether, post-transplant, I'll be able to nip back to the unit for a quick sesh, just a couple of hours or so, y'know, just to take the edge off. After dialysis today, I'm doing it all again tonight. God help me tomorrow...Monday will seem like a long way off.

Comments

  1. My partner is a renal patient of some years and has a very similar outlook to yourself. This particular post mirrors some of the times we've had together.

    Keep up the blog, I love the writing style, you should apply for a job with "Punch Magazine"

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The nights are closing in

The final step of my home dialysis journey (bleugh, journey...sounds like I'm on The X Factor) begins on the 22nd July when Nurse Carla will arrive with a sleeping bag and, presumably, some strong coffee, and sit on my sofa all night whilst I perform my first nocturnal session. It is the dialysis equivalent of hiring a wet nurse. During a regular daytime session, nothing should go wrong unless I have lined the machine carelessly with one eye on Only Connect and consequently forgotten to connect/un-clamp/tighten something pivotal. Dermot should behave, stay quiet and not do any of his ghastly alarm-yelping. At night, however, the chances of rolling over onto the tubes and occluding the blood flow, or the needles falling out and slowly bleeding to death, are much higher, what with all the concurrent sleeping I'll be doing; when this happens Dermot senses DANGER and screams at me. Undoubtedly, my first session with Carla will be seamless; I know from experience that it is only ...

Postscript

You wouldn't believe where I am. You could guess, if you've seen the gratuitous images of my self-satisfied gurning face in front of an infinity pool on Facebook...otherwise you might find it hard to imagine the paradise in which I currently find myself. I am in Dubai. Bar Abby Clancey and the cast of TOWIE, is is not everyone's idea of paradise - it actually wasn't mine. It is exciting, exotic and fucking hot, but the skyscrapers and traffic, the desert and cultural  deficiency (not to mention the chavs that clutter up the Ritz Carlton these days, I mean honestly...) suggest you'd be hard-pushed to call it paradise. It is vaulted to utopian heights simply because, four-months after the transplant, I am here. My nearest and dearest suffered for seven years as I dreamily aired my wanderlust. Yet the reward of a post-transplant holiday seemed too extravagant a prize for which to yearn - wasn't a life free from dialysis enough? Wasn't having a drink when t...

Run

I decide to go for a run. I decide to go because when I undress in front of the mirror all I see is my rotund belly and bulbous thighs. I grab at them and pull, as though I am trying to rip off the chunks of flesh. This, in contrast to the tired, dry skin on my face, etched with deep lines like carvings in rock. It has not recovered from the eighteen months when it was not nourished, but elsewhere fat is sprouting. I lace my trainers tightly. I don't know the time, I have stopped wearing a watch. I start running, and soon I am fleeing. It feels good: I haven't been able to run recently - thwarted by low blood pressure. Every rusty muscle is in movement, together, sliding back and forth in tandem and I feel slow but I feel fluid. I pull up from my core. I think I am the best runner you will see today because once I watched a tutorial on YouTube with Paula Radcliffe. I run alongside the common, not on the grass; I prefer the solidity of the ground, the heaviness that rises ...