Why do you stay?

Why haven't I just found a new nephrologist? That is not as easy as it sounds. There are only a couple in my town. When I was sick in the beginning I met one of them. He is the one who told me I had kidney failure but didn't know why. He said this from the doorway. I don't think he ever stepped one foot in my hospital room. Also I have heard worse stories about him. Worse than my story....so he was not an option.

That left me with the other one. When I first got home from Barnes in January, I was so sick I didn't realize the type of care I was getting. It really wasn't until April or May of 2009 that I started watching and listening very closely to everything going on around me in the dialysis unit.
I also took part of the blame. I felt like I was the one who had the 1 in a million kidney problem so it was not the doctors fault for knowing anything about it. It wasn't until I realized not only did he not know anything about it, he didn't care to know anything about it. That is what bothered me.

It also began to bother me that I saw and heard of other patients being treated poorly. I have always taken up for myself and when I couldn't my family did. But some of my fellow dialysis patients had nobody and they didn't know any different. They didn't have an insider dialysis nurse in the family like I did. There was so much wrong, it bothered me for their sake.

So once on PD, I thought things were going to get better. And it did for awhile. After threatening to call Network 13 on them, they all but rolled out the red carpet for me for my monthly PD visit. I started noticing they treated me different (better) in so many ways from the other patients. This did not settle well with me. I knew they were only making me happy to keep me quiet. It was a fake nice. I would rather you spit in my face than pretend to be my best friend. I began to ask myself this question, "If Jesus was on dialysis and everything was going okay for him, would he be okay with knowing that others were being treated less than?" The answer is NO. I firmly believe Jesus would have wanted his fellow dialysis friends and strangers to have the best treatment available.

Advocacy runs through my veins.

So I would stay a few months longer but I was actively looking for a different doctor.