Dialysis every other day

Dialysis became something I would do every other day at Barnes. I don't remember when but I did finally look at the machine. It is crazy! Basically this machine removes all of your blood (not all at once, over 3-4 hours) cleans and filters out the toxins in your body. It also removes some fluid from your body at the same time. Your body, unlike mine, does this naturally called urinating. So, my body was holding on to all of this waste, toxins and fluid and the machine would filter my blood for me. If you have ever seen a slurpy machine at a gas station, that's kinda what the dialysis machine reminds me of. Approximately 2 cups of blood are removed from my body out of one tube in my neck, runs through a lot of tubing and filters and through this miraculous machine and back into my body through another line in my neck with the clean blood. The whole treatment is 3-4 hours. My blood pressure was taken every thirty minutes. It was amazing though. I could enter dialysis with really high blood pressure, feel like death ans swollen and literally leave with fair blood pressure, weak because dialysis literally drains you and be 10lbs lighter!!!!

I really hated dialysis but truth be told, 30-40 years ago, my diagnosis would have been a death sentence. So this amazingly loud, beeping slurpy machine was keeping me alive.