My fistula is ugly.
It’s not as large as some other patients but under certain lighting, it looks pretty bad. It also gave the techs some problems today. Everything was going well for the first 45 minutes. Then the arterial pressure alarm started screaming. The tech tried to rotate then reposition the needle but it started hurting. She then decided to switch the needle site so the other tech got another needle and jabbed me without lidocaine. Ooooowwwww! Holy sh*t did that hurt a lot. By then my entire arm was in pain, and my blood pressure was dropping fast. Usually they pull all the needles out at the end of the session, but they pulled the unused one now to see if it wold lessen the pain. Not really.
Since I was getting dizzy from the low blood pressure, the nurse came over to give oxygen and stop the UF fluid removal. Now there are three people surrounding my chair, with me in obvious pain. They ended up reclining my chair and giving me some ice for the arm. There was still a lot of pain but it was slowly subsiding. Great, another three hours to go.
It’s now about 8:30 am so I have another 1:20 to go. Arm is better if I don’t move it too much. Since the dialysis chair sucks and my back hurts if I recline too long, I’m sitting up again, but with the oxygen tube still stuck in my nose under the mask.
I’m weirded out by the huge blood pressure drop. I was very lightheaded and my vision started to blur. The tech said it was a natural reaction to stress and pain. I thought it would go up instead. Here is a chart for the first few hours.
The AHA categories are not too useful. I’m always in Hypertension Stage 1 or Stage 2. Even my low reading of 84/50 was recorded as normal even though I was about to pass out.
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It’s now 5:00 pm. The rest of the dialysis session was uneventful. They unhooked me at 10:00 am and I was out by 10:15 am. I took a short nap earlier, but my arm is still hurting a bit, and my right hand is somewhat numb. I am worried about going into dialysis on Monday and having “strangers” try to cannulate my fistula. I hope they don’t screw up.
Life with chronic diseases 