Hello IHD crowd. I have lurked enough. It is time for the introduction.
My husband and I got married in Vegas in December 2012.
We have been together almost 20 years so while the ceremony was rather anti-climactic (walk up window right across the street from the license bureau because we thought it was pretty funny ) it was probably long overdue.
My husband is a type 1 diabetic and has high blood pressure ( under control with meds ) and has been seeing a neph for a couple of years now. We have been watching his kidneys decline slowly but surely and we knew it was not going to get better.
Came home from Vegas and had an uneventful 6 weeks until I wound up in the hospital with a pulmonary embolism (out of the blue, folks, no other clots have been found). While I am in said hospital, Hubby has his neph appt. and is told his kidneys have gone from 35% percent last year to 21% now and it is time to consider getting a "port".
We are no strangers to kidney disease. I lost my mother some ten years ago. She had a heart attack. She had been on dialysis for three years. She was not living in my household at the time she was diagnosed with kidney disease and I was just a taxi service on Saturdays ( 'cause I had weekend off work). I saw the inside of the center she was using, I saw the acess she was using ( chest cath because her vascular system was shot due to high blood pressure ), but was not around enough to be intimate with the everyday things that dialysis patients have to deal with. The one and only time I ever attempted to sit with her during a treatment, she tossed me out after about a half hour into it. Told me to go be a productive member of society until she needed a ride home
. I miss my Mom.
So here we are, I dont know zippity doo-dah about this whole dialysis thing, and my husband is just walking around in shock (deer in the headlights, baby). I google dialysis and guess what I find? You guys
. So six weeks ago I didn't know a fistula from a frogs butt, but with the info shared by the members of this online community I am better informed.
Thank you so much, people.
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