Yesterday's trip to the fistula maintenance center in Flatlands began with me waking at 6am and getting picked up at 6:45 by my favorite driver, a friendly guy in his late 60's who grew up "in Soviet Union" but speaks fluent moose-and-squirrel English. During the drive we chatted and caught up, with him regaling me with tales of his recent fishing excursion upstate (he's heavily into the relaxation and quiet of catch-and-release), reminiscences about his younger days when his wife was a party girl who would party hard for two straight days and come home a mess (he hates partying, so it was an odd match), and his complaints about how "women will drive you crazy." All of which was accented with a background soundtrack of an extended mix of Boney M's dance floor classic, "Rasputin." (I swear, you can't make this shit up. These native Russians are characters.)
We made it to the maintenance center just before 7:30, with my appointment/procedure scheduled for 8am, and when I arrived there was already a crowded waiting room. I got processed, had my vitals taken and my blood sugar checked, then they handed me a gown, cap, and booties ahead of me being admitted to the OR.
When you have a dialysis fistula in your arm, you must go in for a quarterly check of your fistula's flow to make sure it is free of clotting, and the way they do that is to numb your arm with a local and then go into the fistula with a fiber optic camera, aided by assorted scanners and wires hooked up to the patient (who is strapped down to the table). In my case, they numbed me and schlamped the camera in there for a look around, and they found no problems, so I was in and out of there quick, with a half-hour holdover for observation as the local wore off. But the one thing that sucks about this every time is that once the local wears off, the entry point into the fistula is sore and painful for the next several hours, a state bolstered by the tight bandaging with a special hard plug bound into the bandaging over the entry point.
As I was awake so early, I kept nearly nodding off all day, until I got home, after which I crashed for several hours. And I don't know if it was due to me not being allowed food or drink for something close to 12 hours before the procedure, but when I got home and finally was able to make and eat some breakfast, about twenty minutes after eating, I just hurled it all up. Attempts at eating even a light little something after that were met with more puking, so I just gave up for the day. When I eat breakfast, I should be fine, as breakfast is the one meal of the day where it's about a 95% chance that I will keep it down.
No comments:
Post a Comment