Very Likely TL;DR

 First off:
 あけましておめでとうございます。
今年もよろしくおねがいします!  

 (Akemashite  Omedeto Gozaimasu!)

I did a twelve-week (give or take) stint on PD and had peritonitis for most of that time. I was either in the hospital or at home in bed for most of it. I spent a week in Ger’s place o’ business, Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo, where they treated me like Queenie Smith. Hello to my lovely nurses’ aide, Grace, who tried to give me her earrings when I told her they were pretty! Then, I was sprung with a big truckload of IV antibiotics to ingest and I have no idea what the staff of the hotel thought we were doing with a roomful of medical supplies and drugs. Because we didn’t have an IV pole, Chris rigged up a bungee cord from the ceiling fan and later told the guy at the desk that it had to be left there but that we were not using it for any felonious-type behavior. PD was ultimately a failure for me because I could not avoid peritonitis and had I continued, I’d be typing this from Overlook Medical Center, I am certainsure of it. My lovely new nephrologist, Dr Phillip Klein, who once told me that it is like he is my mother and I am a sixteen-year-old girl, informed me that PD was not for me and that I would be having the Tenkoff catheter removed. Back to hemodialysis for me, this time DaVita on the old Muhlenberg Hospital Campus, at 6 a.m.

Woah.

I felt like kind of a failure until I looked at PD realistically. The first time I was filled up at Overlook, I felt like a sumo guy was sitting on my chest. I was honestly afraid that the skin on my belly would rip. 2500 ml of sugar water was sloshing around in there and I actually caught myself thinking about how I could escape my body and breathe. Because breathing is everything. Get your Pyrex measuring cup out and fill it with water. Dump it into a big honking bowl. Fill and dump until you have 2500 ml in the bowl. Through this completely scientific experiment, you will find that it is a shitload of fluid and thank the FSM that you are not a PD patient. Everyone kept telling me that I’d get used to it but I never did. Even when they decreased the dialysate amount to 2K, I still felt like I’d be having a ten-pound baby the next morning. The second time I was filled up I thought, verbatim: “I can’t get out of this body because I don’t have a gun.” If I had said that out loud, I’d be typing this from a locked ward while wearing the crazy mittens. It is a very good thing I don’t have a gun, because I’d probably take some people with me when I completely hypothetically rode out of the ol’ corral. BUT NOT IN REAL LIFE. Don’t be silly, of course not.

I also didn’t like having to report to two very persistent and gung ho nurses four or five or six times a day. I was doing PD to get more privacy, not to accumulate telephone buddies. If I want to talk on the phone, I’ll call one of the sisters. Or Gerry.  I hate to talk on the phone and when that call requires the reportage of numbers and all kinds of calculation, I would rather talk to an alzheimer’s patient exclusively all day. Or a dead person. The “director” of the PD program was very gung ho and evangelistic about it. Every time I got sick, she gave me the distinct impression that I was letting her down and when I went to California, it completely destroyed our relationship beyond repair. This program was intense and authoritative and a total function of the personality of the nurse.  She was a very nice person and I liked her very much. Because of my highly authoritarian childhood, I don’t do well with authority or people who insist on regimentation. Needless to say, I was sad to leave the program but relieved not to be disappointing this nurse on a daily basis.  But, you know what that meant…

Hemodialysis at a treatment center at the crack of dawn. Because my beloved Kleinie is the medical director of the place, I jumped ship to DaVita. I really enjoyed the staff of Fresenius for the most part and especially miss Saffy Sakura (who almost made an African Christian out of me : D) and Stacy (who went to St. Vinny’s too) and K and all the wonderful nurses from the Philippines. Filipinos are probably the most big-hearted people in the world and the ones at Fresenius especially so. A few times, I had to lose my mind and tell them that they should not be allowing the homeless patients to wander in and walk around the treatment floor coughing and sneezing or to SPEAK ENGLISH when delivering or discussing my care, but other than that I have nothing bad to say.

So, now I am a DaVita cadet and for the most part, the staff is less intensely personal but infinitely more professional. I like to know the people who get a look at my fabulous bewbs three  times a week. And, I like them to be respectful of me, which they are at this particular DaVita. There is a couple of really wonderful techs and the nurses all seem to know what they are doing too. It is clean and efficient. Nobody calls to yell at me for my numbers or sound like I kicked their dog. It’s the Big Pink Chair again, this time for 3.5 hours, Klinie’s torturous extra half hour included. I hate it and despise it and would enjoy it thoroughly if it were made redundant by some remarkable new breakthrough in the field of nephrology that allowed us to build new kidneys from our own cells. Until then or transplant, I’m a prisoner of the Big Pink Chair and I think this is long enough for now.