Days without Dialysis

[anja]

Good for you , Bajanne!        You really watched your fluids or did a whole lotta sweating...  Hope you were able to enjoy yourself, sure the class did!            You are such a dedicated teacher and I am positive you make learning FUN!!!   

[Bajanne]

Thanks again to all!  The thing that I feared most was the possibility of cramping, but thank goodness, that didn't happen.  Just as I was being taken of the machine, one leg started to want to cramp, but as my lines were disconnected, I was able to stand a little and it quickly wore off.  I am so scared of cramping.  I rate it as the worst thing I have to deal with in dialysis.

[Duane]

 







EDITED: Removed picture, you can post this picture in the motorcycle thread - Sluff/ Admin

[stauffenberg]

Because dialysis has to be paid for privately in the Philippines, where almost no one has private health insurance and the people are very poor, most dialysis patients can only afford dialysis once a week!  As a result, they all look deathly ill all the time; most cannot walk by themselves and have to be loaded from their wheelchair into the hospital bed; and their skin turns a sickly, dark-green color.  But still, they do survive, though usually not for very long.  The nephrologists in the Philippines could not tell me how long they can survive that way, since all the patients run out of money to pay for treatment long before they reach the limit of their natural life expectancy under those circumstances. Incredibly, the price the nephrologists charge these people for each treatment they receive in the dialysis clinics which the doctors own includes a good profit margin as return for their investment.  As a result, the time of death of the patients is accelerated considerably by the need of the doctors, bound as they are by the Hippocratic Oath to sacrifice themselves for their health of their patients, to get rich.

[Bajanne]

That was so sad to read.  And here was my nephrologist chiding me for missing my treatment, and it makes no difference to his salary whether I dialyse or not.  I need to be more thankful about the situation in which I find myself.  If I didn't have insurance, dialysis would be free for me here - that is the policy.  And there is no difference in the treatment of those with insurance and those without.