Sunday morning 7:55a.m.

Rough week last week. Let me see if I can start where I blogged last. Before we left the hospital Steve had a Fistula-gram which is where they inject dye into the fistula in his arm. It showed that the fistula has branches from the main blood supply which is why it has not matured like it was suppose to. At some point he will have to get this taken care of in order to use this access for dialysis. For now he will use the access in his chest. We did ask when could he get this taken care of and vascular surgeon says no hurry, of course Steve wanted to do this before he left the hospital. Ha!

He has had 2 dialysis treatments at the hospital and 1 at the dialysis center. It makes him feel like crap. He is pretty disappointed. He says he felt better before he had dialysis. Each time was 3 hours. I am hoping that his body will adjust to it because right now he feels and looks terrible. He is very nauseous, very weak and it does weird things to you. When he did the treatment Friday at the center his weight weighing in was 114.9 when we left it was 113.0. They measure in kilos. The nurse said this was perfect. You don't want to pull off too much fluid. According to the nurses at the hospital the first 2 treatments were to just clean the blood and the 3rd was to start taking off fluid. He has to be really careful now with diet and fluid intake. I don''t know if he can survive on the fluid they are limiting him to. Approximately 40oz. of fluid a day is what they said. I am anxious to see what he weighs Monday after going through the weekend.

I am no expert but I would say his kidney may have already quit. They said it probably would once he started dialysis. He only urinates maybe twice a day now. He use to go about every 2 to 3 hours.

We start our training Monday. Steve, Emily and I will be doing the training and in time hope to teach more people. Steve and I decided this was a little more complex than we thought it was going to be. If you can't stand the sight of blood this will not be for you. When we get started I just hope that I am smarter than a 5th grader because it looks like a lot to learn, with no errors.
I will try to get on here again sometime this week. I am am going to work a couple hours on both sides of the training and Emily is going to work evenings each day when we get the training completed each day. So if you don't here from us it is because we are in slumber.

Christy