Biohazard

There are these huge biohazard bins at the dialysis center that gets replaced every so often. I think the waste deposited in the bins are incinerated; not sure if it’s done at the hospital or offsite. There is a lot of hazardous waste since almost everything in the clinic is contaminated by patients’ blood. For me, it’s double the waste since I’m using both access points: catheter and fistula.

For the catheter, first they have to pull the leftover anti-coagulant, in my case it’s argatroban, which uses two locking syringes. These get filled with blood and tossed.

When the fistula is used, the needles are also disposed in the blue bins after dialysis. On Tuesday, the tech had issues inserting the needles in my arm and had to used up four needles instead of two. There’s also the small syringes used to inject lidocaine. Finally, all the tubing and dialysis filters go into a bigger red bin for disposal. There is a crazy amount of waste with dialysis. This was also true when I was on peritoneal dialysis at home.