It is amazing how quickly things can go from awesome to crappy. This took, in total, about 3 hours, but I knew the minute it began. All it takes is one person who puts faith in their own experience overrides their ability to listen. In this case it was a dialysis tech whose absolute faith that she knew the behavior of dialysis access' better than me. I don't like details. They are long, and take too many words, so here's the situation.

My dialysis access has been brokenated. Right now my arm hurts - a lot. I went to the emergency room late Friday night, where I waited three hours for them to tell me to call a vascular surgeon on Monday. "But," said me, "I have dialysis Monday morning, and I can't dialyse if it's not working."

paraphrase of the ER doctor: "Tough titties, kid. Call a doctor in 3 days."

Yeah I know, it's not immediately life threatening. If I don't dialyse, however, I die, and I can't dialyse while the access is broken. It's a crappy situation, especially considering that it could have been avoided if I'd complained more, or if the tech had been more willing to listen to the advice i was giving. Instead I get to go through the thrill of surgery, which may or may not fix my arm. I may end up with a central line, a sexy catheter jutting out of a vein in my neck or chest, while I wait for my old dialysis access to heal, or from a new dialysis access to become useable.

Things like this are bound to happen, I suppose, but I've done a pretty good job of avoiding these situations for years. The last revision of this type i had was about 5 years ago when my 5 year old cousin ran up out of nowhere, grabbed my arm and squeezed. Somethings you just can't control, even when you try.