I'm in Colorado Springs for my little brother's wedding! How fun!

I just love the DaVita unit in Colorado Springs (Pikes Peak Dialysis). They are the largest unit I've had a treatment at thus far. They also have the most staff of any unit I've ever visited. When I was here in January I had a really bad treatment (totally my fault, tried to take off too much) due to the elevation being above 7,000 feet. I didn't realize how much it would impact my treatment. This time, though, I've done much better - didn't try to take off an unnecessary amount. I even had a very interesting tech taking care of me - He was a veteran who used to be in the Army. We had a nice conversation and I also 'trained' him on buttonhole constant site accesses.

Next week I leave for California for my fun vacation.

I just got home from dialysis, and I'm happily munching on a peanut butter and honey sandwich and a (small) glass of milk. I put my unhealthy renal lunch on white bread (yick) instead of wheat... so at least I'm not having nearly as much phosphorous as I could be. If only my dietitian were here, she'd scold me silly! Before my very tastey lunch I took FOUR Renagels (normally I take 2-3) to counter my guilt complex...

Holy crap - I just saw my labwork for the month and my potassium (K) was 7.0 a week ago on Monday! That isn't good at all! I thik that's the highest its ever been, a full 1.5 points above what is acceptable (anything between 3.5 to 5.5 is OK... above or below that and one runs the risk of cardiac arrest).

I'm really surprised no one told me my K was that high - I would've thought the charge nurse would've mentioned it. I can't remember what I ate two weekends ago that would've made it abnormally high. Usually my K is within normal range, even sometimes being low.

(For those of you now confused, potassium is one electrolite that is watched very carefully in kidney failure patients. Too much or too little is a bad thing - generally kidney patients are on a low-potassium diet becauce the kidneys normally regulate the amount of K in the blood. Without kidney function, there is no way for K to be regulated and it can cause heart failure and death in a matter of hours.)

Yes, yesterday I skipped dialysis. Why? Because at Tues dinner the night before I ate some weird/bad Mexican food. Leaving out the gory details, I will just say that dinner did not agree much with my stomach. Anyway, I didn't have much "on" in terms of fluid, and I felt crappy from the effects of bad food (or just food that my stomach didn't like) so I "called in sick" to dialysis yesterday morning at 5:30 AM. Wed's treatment was the first I've ever skipped. I only skipped because I've recently come to the conclusion (realization?) that skipping a treatment every once in awhile (as long as the skipped treatments are few and far between) won't damage me. Even the most compliant patients (which I am) skip on occasion and seem to be none worse for the wear. I actually think it was a good decision on my part to stay home - otherwise I would've been asking to be "unhooked" from the machine every 15 minutes to run (no pun intended) to the bathroom. So, today I had a treatment and I'll have another tomorrow morning. What does this mean? It means that I have a whole day that I can drink more than usual and eat some things (like tomato soup) that I wouldn't usually allow myself to have. Yay TOMATO SOUP!

To my surprise, Stephen C. showed up to deliver a cherry Jolly Rancher to me this morning :) He promised "Uncle Willy" yesterday that he would bring it to me personally. With friends like those, who could ask for more?

A lot of times after dialysis I don't have my arm taped up any more than just a SureSeal bandaid. Even when I do, I take off the tape and gauze fairly immediately after getting home. Today for some reason I had my tech tape up the bottom stick and it was a good thing she did. Half-way home I looked down and noticed the gauze and tape saturated with blood. It actually leaked almost all the way through before it stopped. Luckily the bandage held and there was enough pressure that it stopped bleeding pretty quickly.