I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while now, but life has been a little crazy as of late. Go figure!
So I’ve been doing dialysis for five months now.
It’s certainly not my favorite thing to do, but it’s keeping me alive and who can really put a price on that? Well, aside from my insurance company, anyways – ouch! Thankfully the costs are pretty much covered between my private insurance and Medicare, and we’ve gotten used to hitting our Out of Pocket Max each year from the therapies that the kids used to do at home, so financially it’s not that big of a deal…
It can definitely be overwhelming, though – the extra time that it takes out of my schedule for treatments and doctor’s appointments, the added fatigue, the added sensitivity to things like diet and exercise – it all adds up to the point where I’m having to force myself to re-evaluate my new normal, so to speak. Needless to say, I relate more to the spoons method than I ever have before!
Still, I don’t want to sound all woe is me because when I compare my experience to other people going through the same thing, I realize that it’s actually going pretty well for me right now. I understand the process, which is something that I hear older folks struggling with when I go into the clinic. For the most part, I don’t have much trouble sleeping while the session is taking place, which some say that it’s hell for them to get comfortable. And I think I’m the most sympathetic for the kids that I read about struggling with doing dialysis at their young age and just feeling hopeless that their lives will be anything more than living off of a stupid machine.
I mean, I can complain about not being able to travel much or swim right now, but at 43 years old I can certainly say that I’ve done a lot of the things that I want to do with my life. I couldn’t imagine going through all of this in my teenage years when all I wanted was the freedom to explore life, whether that meant skipping out of school to go see rock concerts or staying up half the night with my friends attempting to create our own! I’ve struggled with depression myself plenty, so I get how looking at the requirements just to stay alive would be pretty dismal at that age.
Motivation has been tough for me lately, even compared to how I felt six weeks ago, so it gets easily overwhelming to look at a list of ten things that I need to get done and have to accept that right now maybe just a couple of them is all that I can reasonably handle. Which is tough because the rest of those ten things still exist and need to get done, but at the end of the day you can only do as much as you can do – whether you’re sick or perfectly healthy.
On top of that, it’s frustrating because I have a couple of tasks that have literally been following me for several months now – a savings account that I’m trying to help my Mom with, an issue with my new Medicare policy, and a side effect that presented itself after I started dialysis that I need a special surgery to correct. Nothing too crazy, but when I’ve got such limited mental bandwidth, I’d love to get them wrapped up so that I can focus my energy on literally anything else!
Oh yeah, and I’m still working on getting on the transplant list, too, though thankfully I’ve only got a couple more tests on my checklist before my case can go to the review board. They say the wait for my blood type (Type O) can be up to five years, so I’ll still be hoping that a living donor will come forward between now and then, but we’ll see what happens.
In the meantime, I’d like to start blogging more again, which I know I’ve said a brazillion times, but creative output seems to help keep my mind in the positive so this summer we’re going to try a little more of that and a little less sweating to 95-degree days in Florida!