#700

700th post. During Divorce Care group meeting yesterday, someone mentioned they kept a journal of their healing process and it was very helpful. I guess this blog is similar. Originally I though it would be about peritoneal dialysis since there was so much to learn and do each night at home. Sometimes I would get home all tired, yet need to spend 30 minutes cleaning and connecting myself to the PD machine. Then the entire process took up close to 12 hours each day; half my life was dedicated to keeping me alive. Anyway, the blog helped.

Then I got emergency heart surgery and also switched back to hemodialysis. It was even more frustrating so this blog became an outlet. It didn’t matter that anyone I knew actually read the blog, just writing stuff down and venting was therapeutic.

So here we are, post #700. Again, a lot of the posts are pretty mundane: I walked this far, I weigh this much, no sleep again, and my foot hurts. I guess part of it shows that even with all these medical issues, I’m trying to live as normal as possible. Even with the pandemic and fear of serious harm/death, I still need to go to dialysis, get food or groceries, and breath “fresh” air once in awhile.

Actually, the weirdest part of this whole experience is dealing with mortality. I guess all these health issues puts me at higher risk of something more serious, and bad things happen on dialysis. I don’t know if other 50-year olds think about death but it’s hard to ignore for me. Some of it is watching fellow dialysis patients disappear from the clinic, and some of it is reading about complications from kidney failure, heart bypass surgery, diabetes, high blood pressure, and now COVID-19. I don’t have any brilliant thoughts or conclusions; I guess I’m still processing all this vs. how life was like 5-10 years ago.