ohhhhh

[petey]

Hubby when he is feeling down will say will there's always someone worse than me. And that's realy true. Many people who have a terminal disease and are dying would gladly change places with a dialysis patient.

Yep -- my Marvin always says as bad as it gets for him sometimes, there's always someone who has it worse.  He believes this so much that he's even got me believing it, too.

[MIbarra]

Twirl,

I'll do an extra bus duty for you!  lol   And you're right. No one understands but someone who goes through it.

When I was on dialysis and had to leave school early (I got out of bus duty 3 x a week) I actually had another teacher say I was so lucky because I got to miss bus duty. UGH! I would do bus duty every day for the rest of my life instead of dialysis! I wish she could have just one day of getting stuck in the arm and sitting in a chair for four hours bored out of her mind!

[spacezombie]

One of the most persistent and profoundly mistaken illusions among pre-dialysis patients, which I note also in Sunny's comments, is the idea that the patient will somehow feel better as dialysis continues!  Since dialysis replicates only 10 to 14% of normal renal function, the longer you stay on dialysis, the more you deteriorate.  That is why life expectancy among dialysis patients is so extremely short, amounting only to 8 years, for example, for a diabetic in his forties.  So you should not expect to feel better as dialysis continues, but much, much worse.  During my first year on dialysis I felt almost normal, except for persistent itching, but as the years went by, the exhaustion, nausea, vomiting, sleepless, and inability to conentrate became steadily worse, until by the end of the eighth year I had to stop work on an academic book I was finsihing, simply because I could no longer compose coherent paragraphs.

Is it common to feel like this while on hemodialysis? I don't feel this way at all on PD. I have nearly as much energy as I did with my transplant. I just have to recharge each night via Baxter's HomeChoice.

[flip]

Everybody feels different on dialysis. It doesn't bother me, probably because I'm an ignorant dumb hillbilly who doesn't know that it's supposed to make me feel bad.

[twirl]

 We are only a keyboard away. Have a wonderful weekend.  that is a quote from W&W


W&W   does IHD have a motto


we are only a keyboard away   what a great motto

[Sunny]

Twirl,
The hardest thing I had to do was give up teaching. That was harder than learning to live with kidney disease (which is hard enough).
It took me 3 years of trying various teaching jobs: first part-time, then reading specialist, then Job sharing. No matter what I did to try to keep working as a teacher,
I found I no longer had the energy or the immune system to allow me to do it. It was also unfair to my darling little students who didn't get the benefit of a fully
functioning teacher with normal energy levels plus my constant absences due to colds or relapses. In the end, it was my husband and two children who set me straight. They told me that they should be their priority given the limited energy I was facing, and not some idealistic value system I was placing on myself.
You have value within your own worth. This value is not just related to your ability to be a good teacher. The hard part is finding
that other value within yourself that will help you find your new place, yet will be just as worthy. Today that might mean just picking up the house a little and taking care of your family. Another day it might mean just getting through dialysis, or finding new medications to help you feel a little better.
Have a wonderful week-end. Next week is looking better already. And I understand about missing teaching.