Year 11 of dialysis began on 11th Nov 2020. The last time I blogged about my dialysis, I had just switched to peritoneal dialysis. That was June 2020 or so. Things haven't worked out well with peritoneal. For one thing, I've lost sensation on my skin, a result of nerve damage following insufficiently effective dialysis (due to the peritoneal dialysis not working as well as it should or could). I can't feel anything on the skin near my solar phlexus, and along both trapezoid muscles. Also, my left foot's sole has gone numb, and the right foot's sole is starting to go number too. Another thing that happened was this unexplained pain in the upper abdomen. The doctors did a lot of tests but found nothing. The pain is simply there, and the only solution doctors have offered is strong opiods to kill the pain. They seem completely uninterested in finding out why the pain occurs at all; in fact, my doctor told me that he thinks the pain is psychological and that I don't really want to do peritoneal dialysis. Another problem is this feeling of fullness in the stomach, which is either also psychological or has some physiological basis, but the doctors are not really interested in why I have this problem.
The doctor advised me to switch to hemodialysis, which of course requires a new dialysis shunt, this time on my left arm because the right arm has been used up (too many operations). So last week, I had the shunt operation.I will now have to wait six weeks before the shunt is mature enough to work. Until then, I have to just put up with the pain and the feeling of fullness. A pretty unpleasant thing to be stuck with.
Initially, the idea was to keep me on peritoneal until I get a transplant. But now I will switch to hemo and wait for a transplant that way. The wait is expected to be another two years at least. Let's hope this second round with hemo is not as horrible as the first.
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