Note: Please excuse the length of this update. I did have the time to catch up while dialyzing today.

I will be done at 3 PM today. Then my weekend for what I call my dialysis weekend will begin the moment I leave the clinic in the afternoon and I do not have treatment again until Tuesday afternoon again starting another week of treatment. Jalissa weighed me in at 96.6 so I will be taking off and out of fluid at 2200/2.2 kilos for my dialysis weekend. I am working on losing weight towards my kidney transplant I am on the list for at Froedert Hospital & Clinics in Milwaukee , Wisconsin. One hour has passed now so I have two hours left to dialyze for my last treatment of the week. I am sitting in the right side of the room today between two other patients I have met while coming here, but don’t know them yet. The patient name Joe, who gets hooked up to the machine before me is across the room at the left side of the room. He has been my neighbor for most of my treatment days, but lately I have not been his neighbor in the room for the past two weeks.

I have been coming and going to and from Fresenius Kidney Care for over two months now and LOVE it here more than I have been at MercyHealth Dialysis Center in the last two years since it moved to the Sister Michael Barry Building. Their care for me was somehow fed to the wild dogs and cats out in the world where strays and lost animals are out to fend for themselves, and my happiness waned quickly with some of the technicians and nurses as if they didn’t know what to do with me anymore. Even my hospital visits became rough and the nurses were kind most of the time, but were questioning my emotional state of mine too harshly at times. After being put into a nursing home facility twice and not being understood and feeling I am not being heard. With MercyHealth and ways of care has gone downhill and my last hospital stay was after I received heparin too soon after a colonoscopy and THEY knew I had a colonoscopy that week. How, I was at Froedert Hospital prepping for it and it took 3 tries to get it done because I was dealing with constipation and my bowels being a little problematic that week. Anyway, now, with Fresenius, the stress and dread of going to dialysis has been gone since I rolled into the lobby in my power chair into the lobby and felt right at home and got to know the receptionist and the nurse in minutes with no excitement Or nervous from my body. I felt I knew these people for a while and wasn’t fearful of new faces and people I haven’t met yet. It was a wonderful start on July 1st at Fresenius Kidney Care Clinic. I loved it the minute I got here. 

Ever since I have been here for almost 3 months now as of September 3rd, I do want to admit that my 2 hours and 45 minutes no longer existed and I was on a dialysis machine for 4 hours for the first few days of treatment, which has been fine to me, but I did ask if I could be on for 2 hours and 45 minutes here or even on for 3 hours was good enough. I liked the time frame of the day and ok to be on a machine at the clinic. 

As I sit here working on my diary entry, I just looked at the time and the clock is ticking towards the 2 PM mark in 15 minutes I will be done in 1 hour from now. I am chilling and watching all the technicians do their jobs and having conversations with one another as they work their magic with the patients who are dialyzing for the day. In the nearest future and before the year is gone, Jackie, Deb, and I will be learning how to dialyze at home 5 times a week at 3 hours a day in the home. This is one reason why I have left MercyHealth Dialysis as well. Fresenius Kidney Care Clinic has hemodialysis machines for the home and I am looking forward to it and having more freedom away from going to a clinic 3x a week. Mercy Dialysis does not offer home dialysis for hemodialysis at all. It’s only for PD dialysis which is called peritoneal dialysis ONLY. Fresenius offers both Peritoneal and Hemodialysis in the home today! The way Dr. Anjum runs his clinic isn’t for me anymore. A lot of MercyHealth is not for ME anymore. I trust radiology and the colonoscopy doctor named Kahn because he took good care of me while I was in the hospital prepping for another colonoscopy and my first endoscopy that was scheduled but canceled due to the fact that the bowels with blood wrapped around them cleared up during my preparation for the procedure and I was discharged without the need for the procedure! He did NOT have to do the procedures on me after all. That week I was hospitalized, Jackie stayed with me over night while I was in the hospital to keep me calm and sane, because I do get loopy at times at night. Medication and my hospital visits overnight can be strange and stressful for me since I was the hospital in 2022 due to Covid and when I had the hematoma, and was not in my right mind at those times due to medication and my blood infection I found out about while I was hospitalized in September 2022, and in a nursing home that had ONLY one nurse on the weekends and the younger generation doesn’t want to work at all. It’s not funny or hilarious these days As nursing homes and home care is hurting for nurses and technicians to work. Also, St. Elisabeth Nursing Home has changed so much since my Grandpa Clarence Fox was there before Mom and Lonnie had him moved to a nursing home in New Mexico in 1999, two years after Grandma Myra, his wife, passed away from CHF one day short of her 78th birthday on October 1, 1997 while being a patient at MercyHealth, when care was NOT questionable back in a day. I trusted MercyHealth back then because of the fact I was getting labs done every month monitoring my transplanted kidney that was almost 10 years out since the surgery in March 1988 and my doctor was a UW-Hospital and Clinic doctor at the time.

Well, I looked at the time again and in about 39 minutes I will be done dialyzing and be taken off the machine for my dialysis weekend to begin by the time I get picked up by 3:15 PqM today by WNM Medical Ride and home. My BP has stayed above 100/50 today with no need to stop dialysis for any reason yet today. This is MY FIRST dialysis appointment where the machine has had the need to stop and alarm today! I am happy and excited that dialysis is going so smoothly today.

That is an update o have looked forward to writing today and soon my weekend will be beginning, and I won’t have to see the Fresenius staff until MY next week’s treatments. I don’t feel cramped, tired, or cold sitting here today writing away my life’s story of dialysis today. I believe God is good all the time, and all the time God is good! I may be stubborn and opinionated at times, but I’m human and, mark my words, don’t talk to God everyday, but I am impressed with His work in me these days in my life despite my love for Him needs some work to this day! I do love Him!