Peritoneal Dialysis - The First Try

 Well, so the day the PD nurse came to visit me at home to guide me through all this stuff the first time. I was all excited and nervous, and he tried to make things easier. By the way, he is a very nice guy, and all the time from the catheter inserting and then twice per week training washing in the hospital he always called me every day and asked how it's going.

Unfortunately, it didn't go well. Standard cycler (APD Machine) cycles are the first Initial drain, then four cycles Fill - Dwell - Drain. It in my case has to take exactly 8 hours with 10 liters of dialysis solution going through. Your time and solution amount can differ, of course.

When we connect all bags, claps and connectors and turn the machine on i felt unbearable pain. It was like someone insert red hot stick and turn it around. We had to stop it and he decided to invite me next day to the hospital to try to find solution to this problem. The machine can be programmed and then your nurse or doctor send it via machine's modem online and program is changing. 

If it will be impossible to continue peritoneal dialysis due to pain or other problems, only way would be changing to hemodialysis, that i of course didn't want at all. Next time i'll write about new program and one of problems people meet the most - initial drain pain. 

My experience with Peritoneal Dialysis: Introduction

Hello there!

First of all, i want to apologize for my bad English - it's not even my second language:)

Well, now, when i'm 63, after five years of fighting Chronic Kidney Disease and kidney cancer successful (though pretty complicated) surgery, i had to make a decision: to begin dialysis or not, and if yes, which one. My creatinine level raised up to 8 mg/dl, what means eGFR was about 6 ml/min/1.73m².

After lot of thinking - at the beginning i thought not to continue any kind of therapy at all - i finally decided to  try dialysis and choose peritoneal one. I began it October 2 2020, so it's pretty fresh.

Here i wanted to share my experience and some tips and tricks i learned hard by myself. I wonder, if it will help to anyone, cause i didn't find online much info about it. My home setup is Baxter Homechoice Claria machine, as you can see below.

My PD Setup

So if someone will be interested in my experience, like initial drain pain, manual drain, shoulder pain and so on - things you can feel and doctors usually don't tell you before you begin your therapy - i will be glad to share and tell how i try to solve those problems myself. It's only beginning, and i'll try to update this blog often, if someone will be interested. Please leave comments so i will know if anyone needs it. Thank you for your time for now :)