There’s a guy on my unit who, mostly, I hate. He is loud, obnoxious, casually racist and – by far his worst trait – he sometimes tries to talk to me. On Saturday, however, I couldn’t help but feel for him: he arrived for dialysis to find his fistula had stopped working. You can judge the severity of situations here at Hospital Heights by how quickly the doctor arrives to see you, so when two of them arrived after a mere hour and a half, it was clear for all to see that this was serious.
Dialysis patients rely on a functioning fistula the same way Jordan relies on publicity: we would quite literally expire without it. Forget waiting the three days it would take to schedule a spot of fistula-fixing surgery; not dialysing, though an immensely appealing option, is not a realistic one. I’ve heard of patients missing the odd session here and there, and some are more tolerant than others of doing so (for the record, I am not tolerant; I need dialysis like a junkie needs crack. I am a dialysis fiend.) Consequently, the poor guy was booked in to have a temporary dialysis line inserted into his – wait for it – groin, and despite his best efforts to convince them otherwise, the doctors were adamant that this was a procedure he should be awake to enjoy. “We can give you a bit of sedation,” said Doctor 1. “A lot of sedation,” replied my former foe, echoing a demand I have made myself on many occasions.
He disappeared eventually to have what I am sure was a pretty crappy evening. The whole scenario only served to remind me how reliant all us Renal Failures are on the Almighty Dialysis Machine. Undeniably, there are times when this fact makes me feel a tad melancholy…there are also times when I would rather go to college, take A Levels in the sciences, apply for medical school, spend a summer volunteering at a charity-run Aids clinic in Uganda to gain experience, attend seven years of medical training, specialise in surgery, observe numerous operations before gradually beginning to perform minor surgical procedures myself, work nights in A&E stitching up the cuts in the heads of hobos who have been fighting other hobos, specialise more specifically in renal surgery, travel to Pakistan, enjoy some of the country’s rich culture, buy a kidney off the black market, inject myself with some industrial local anaesthetic and perform a kidney transplant on myself, then ever have to come back to dialysis again. But fortunately those times are of diminished frequency. It is incredible what we humans will put up with in order to simply survive, but the stuff happening in my life outside of the dialysis unit is fairly awesome so…I guess I’ll just do whatever it takes.
Dialysis patients rely on a functioning fistula the same way Jordan relies on publicity: we would quite literally expire without it. Forget waiting the three days it would take to schedule a spot of fistula-fixing surgery; not dialysing, though an immensely appealing option, is not a realistic one. I’ve heard of patients missing the odd session here and there, and some are more tolerant than others of doing so (for the record, I am not tolerant; I need dialysis like a junkie needs crack. I am a dialysis fiend.) Consequently, the poor guy was booked in to have a temporary dialysis line inserted into his – wait for it – groin, and despite his best efforts to convince them otherwise, the doctors were adamant that this was a procedure he should be awake to enjoy. “We can give you a bit of sedation,” said Doctor 1. “A lot of sedation,” replied my former foe, echoing a demand I have made myself on many occasions.
He disappeared eventually to have what I am sure was a pretty crappy evening. The whole scenario only served to remind me how reliant all us Renal Failures are on the Almighty Dialysis Machine. Undeniably, there are times when this fact makes me feel a tad melancholy…there are also times when I would rather go to college, take A Levels in the sciences, apply for medical school, spend a summer volunteering at a charity-run Aids clinic in Uganda to gain experience, attend seven years of medical training, specialise in surgery, observe numerous operations before gradually beginning to perform minor surgical procedures myself, work nights in A&E stitching up the cuts in the heads of hobos who have been fighting other hobos, specialise more specifically in renal surgery, travel to Pakistan, enjoy some of the country’s rich culture, buy a kidney off the black market, inject myself with some industrial local anaesthetic and perform a kidney transplant on myself, then ever have to come back to dialysis again. But fortunately those times are of diminished frequency. It is incredible what we humans will put up with in order to simply survive, but the stuff happening in my life outside of the dialysis unit is fairly awesome so…I guess I’ll just do whatever it takes.
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