Life on the list

It turns out, according to DaVita.com, an amazing website I have just come across, that I am on the wrong type of dialysis. I took their quiz to find out which type of treatment would suit me best; it was a closely fought battle between home haemo and peritoneal dialysis (PD) and they were neck and neck right up to Question 13, when I got screwed. "Would you like to do dialysis with blood and needles OR would you like to do dialysis WITHOUT blood and needles?" I answered truthfully: I clicked without, but I don't think this was what question 13 was getting at. Question 14 was even more leading: "Would you like to do dialysis through a vascular access in your arm OR would you like to do dialysis through a catheter in your abdomen?" Question 14 is the whole ball-game really - the good people at DaVita could have wholly dispensed with the rest of the quiz. It doesn't matter whether you'd prefer to watch kittens play with yarn whilst you dialyse or ...

The problem with my feet started out as, "that's odd" but by today had become, "what the FUCK - I'm hobbling down Clapham high street, CRYING" having gradually taken on the flavour of "I really should do something about this..." over the course of the last month. Now that I was struggling to walk,  and having been deterred by the £130 it would cost me to spend an hour with the local podiatrist, I finally went to my GP today. She was nice - like, really nice. Not "I want to lick you" nice, but some doctors are so jaded that they can barely muster the energy to listen to your complaint and mostly just advise you to make another appointment (with their colleague) if it hasn't cleared up/gone down/stopped burning in a fortnight. To be fair, most GPs find me quite exciting: end-stage renal failure is more interesting than gastroenteritis I suppose, but I wasn't even wearing my renal hat today and still the doctor was friendly, atten...

There was I thinking home dialysis was supposed to end all the problems. Recently I've had pain in my feet that reached a crescendo yesterday, making it difficult for me to walk; it is linked to the dialysis in some way but I don't know how. NB: Googling unspecified medical conditions only makes it worse: I cried myself to sleep some time after midnight convinced I was going to end up as a cripple, living out my days in untreatable discomfort. When I woke up this morning, I couldn't bare to look at Dermot so I went and had a swim which vastly improved both the pain and my mood. I came home, spent a genial hour cleaning and tidying, ate some Snack-a-Jacks then switched Dermot on in preparation for a relaxed session during which I planned to read The Guardian and do some work. Three hours later, having lost the fluid I'd intended to remove through crying, the emergency on-call technician was still in my bedroom, having abandoned his gardening and Thai bride and their ...