Skip to main content

Easter? Bah, humbug...

Today, I am Easter Scrooge; I am the Easter Bunny with miximatosis. Though for a nominal few Easter is about Jesus and resurrection and blah blah blah...for most of us, the true meaning of Easter is trussed up in garish wrapping and devoid of any nutritional benefit: easter, praise the Lord, is about chocolate.

Unless you happen to be in kidney failure. This morning my mother presented my little brother with a hefty Lindt egg, and I got...a hug. My phosphate level is too high: Something about the calcium leaking out of my bones...I forget what the dietician said, I was too busy watching ER and eating a bag of Jelly Babies. Without an Egg to call your own, Easter just becomes another day and dialysis doesn't stop for bank holidays.

To make matters worse, it is not just chocolate that is now off the menu. All dairy produce and shellfish are banned, in addition to Diet Coke, which is like being hit in the nipples. My potassium level had also rocketed, taking with it my ability to eat most fruit and food items such as mushrooms, spinach, potatoes (including crisps, damn) and tomatoes. When all the sinful items are finally collated, I'm basically left with tuna and Snack-a-Jacks. Fortunately, these two items constitute a large proportion of my diet anyway.

Having restrictions imposed on what you can eat is incredibly frustrating. It is simply another way for this ridiculous disease to entrench its grubby claws even more firmly into your life and it serves as a daily reminder, even on the sacred non-dialysis days. You'd be amazed at how much you crave offal and kiwi fruit once they have been forbidden; I do not usually pay close attention to my diet, but instead tend to subsist on whatever food stuff finds its way into my hand first. It turns out, I am a prolific and cereal phosphate-and-potassium consumer. When I finally get a transplant, I am going to spend several very pleasurable weeks re-affirming my love affair with milk.

Fortunately, with the exception of beer (which I don't drink anyway) alcohol, by and large, escapes the dietary purge. As long as you overlook the fact that I'm also supposed to be on a daily 600 ml fluid restriction - and I generally do - there is no problem with getting drunk. The problem comes the morning after I get drunk when my hungover body demands the very foods I am unable to give it - primarily chocolate and crisps, good, hearty hangover fare. Last weekend, following a fairly disastrous house party, my house mates and I went out for a fry-up: I could feel a potassium induced heart attack coming on just looking at the plate. Eggs - bad-. Baked beans - bad. Mushrooms and fried tomatoes - very, very bad. I gingerly picked at some dry toast and wolfed down a sausage, cursing my stupid blood levels.

Hopefully, after a few weeks on a ultra restricted diet, my phosphate and potassium levels will return to within the margins of safety; I will subsequently have a bit more leeway and be able to eat the Bad foods in moderation. All this restriction, will, of course, only make the transplant even sweeter when if finally comes along. By the time Easter comes around next Easter, I may well have a brand new kidney to call my own... in which case, I'll be the one smeared in chocolate with a huge smile on my face because nothing will taste sweeter than that egg.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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

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

Dying to donate?

"Sooo...if you stopped dialysis, how long would it take you to die?" Katie asked me over juice and Bourbons yesterday. It sounds like a morbid topic of conversation for a sunny Thursday afternoon, but fortunately it is not something I am squeamish about. Unfortunately, for 5 renal failure patients a day, this disease proves fatal, but the extreme potential of kidney failure is something I came to terms with a long time ago; yes, I might die from kidney failure, but you might get hit by a bus tomorrow. And then maybe I'd get your kidney. Katie's blunt question came as part of a larger discussion we were having about the general societal attitude towards donation. The fact that only around 25% of the population are currently willing to donate their organs suggests that most people have a very negative perception of the process - if only this were true. Whilst there are those who do have a strong moral, physical or religious objection to donating (and have a clear and