pwndcake

Today I am marking as the beginning of my way of life. It's a Thursday, and I don't have hemodialysis. Instead I have a shipment of peritoneal dialysis supplies on its way to my house, and a machine setup on my desk near my bed with which to use them. Every night, while I sleep, the bad stuff will be quietly washed out of my body. The total treatment time takes 9 hours (yeah, that's a while), but considering that I now have nowhere I need to be at 9am that sounds like a decent amount of time. In fact, it sounds like another of those mixed blessings that I seem to frequently receive. It's a doctor's order for a full night's sleep. How awesome is that?

Here are the other awesome orders the doctor's gave me with peritoneal dialysis:

• Eat more french fries. I'm not even kidding. I need more potassium in my diet on peritoneal dialysis so french fries, potato chips, tomato soup, bananas (yes bananas even!) are all on the menu. In fact if I don't eat enough potassium I may die so Tim's Potato Chips here I come! It has been too long. NOM NOM NOM



• Eat more - of everything! Yes, with dialysis every day I'm going to need more of all that vital stuff that I've had to cut back on. More protein, more salt, more potassium, more iron, more of all of it. So guess who's going back on the steak on cheesecake diet?



• Drink more. Yup, that's on there too. Since I have dialysis every night, and the strength of the dialysis is up to me, I can pretty much drink however much I want of almost anything I want. There are limits to how much fluid I can take off in a night, but considering I'm used to drinking very little right now, I'm comparitively allowed to go wild. Four cups of coffee a day? Sure! Hell, it's even got potassium! Coffee is good for me now! Woohoo! Wine? Hey, knock yourself out. Beer! Well... maybe not a lot of beer. Turns out beer has phosphorous in it, and that's still a tough mineral for dialysis to remove. But I can now have more beer than I could before... considering that before I was supposed to have none.

One day you wake up, and the thing you've been hoping for is there. Everything is different, even though it mostly looks the same. A new prop here, a few new decorations there, but from that waking moment on you know the story is not the same.