Skip to main content

Early nights

A week ago I wrote an extensive piece about my turbulent start to nocturnal dialysis: the alarms, the lack of sleep, the fact that my life was over...the usual stuff. Then I decided not to post it, because in retrospect the majority of the problems were caused by my own incompetence and it seemed incredibly indulgent to whinge about it. The sessions became easier and more efficient, and the article was all but redundant.

This post will be brief; I shall look to write a longer post later, one that details my hilarious nocturnal dialysis antics in full. For now, I shall just say this: I am pretty tired. My internship is hugely enjoyable and rewarding but the days are long and I have only an hour or two when I get home to chew on whatever happens to be in my fridge (ageing salad, questionable tinned tuna) before I have to turn my attention to Dermot. I know it will take time to get used to doing nights, and I am grateful for the additional freedom this regime will give me...but I so miss being able to go to bed and sleep peacefully, and I am terrified at the prospect of having to attach myself to the machine almost every night for the rest of my life. This is life now, this is it: no wider goal to move towards. Sometime I pray to a God I don't believe in for a transplant that is unlikely to ever come.

And to think I said I wouldn't whinge...I have concluded that actually, what I need far more than a throbbing kidney, is a holiday, a break, so that when it is twenty past nine on a Sunday evening, and Dermot is yelping at me because low water pressure is hindering his heat disinfection, and all I want to do is watch Don't Trust The Bitch in Apartment 23 and fall asleep clutching Bear...I'll be able to cope with it a bit better. If only the world could stop spinning for a week or two; I would revel in the stillness.

Comments

  1. Dear Rosy, so sorry not to have been in touch for so long, life has been busy and difficult at times but no excuse really especially considering all that you are having to cope with. You are such an inspiration my lovely and I so hope and pray that a Kidney becomes available for you soon. I can't imagine how unbearable things must be for you and yet you continue to plod on. Do people read and comment on your blog often? I'm sure you must be a real inspiration to others going through similar experiences.
    Please tell me about the nicer parts of your life? your studying etc. Do you have some good friends to lean on?
    I really wish I had the words to make things feel a little better for you but I feel so helpless.
    This is just a brief note for now but we'd love to see you sometime in the future if at all possible. We still have the tray you brought to Richard's Birthday in October. Goodness how time flies and not just when one is having fun as you know all too well.
    Please pass on our love to mum.
    Take care and much love April and Richard sends his love too of course xxxx

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

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 ...

Snow business like this kidney business

Snow: renal failure's arch nemesis. Though probably not in Norway, where they can actually handle snowfall. Today's Times reports on how the country is desperately dealing with the "situation" now that we have...ooh, a good two or three inches of snow on the ground; dialysis patients fall into the same category as those undergoing radiotherapy in terms of the need for treatment. Last year, I trekked across the icy wilderness of North London on foot with only my Uggs, my ipod and a Tracker for salvation (much like Shackleton, I would imagine) to get to the hospital. Only to find the Northern Line was running. I am fortunate in that I can just about miss one session. For the last two years I have been on dialysis, I have missed four sessions: once to meet a "friend" who was in town literally for that afternoon; once for my grandfather's funeral; once because I couldn't be bothered (and possibly because there was an episode of Gilmore Girls I wanted t...