Traveling With Peritoneal Dialysis

Starting Sunday and for a week, my wife are I are traveling to Indiana via our BMW X5 to visit with family. She has three sisters living there. This is our first trip since I started Peritoneal Dialysis on 9/30/2023 and we’re probably over preparing in the face of so many unknowns.

One of the first things we accomplished was to borrow from our local Fresenius group the travel case for the Cycler. The picture at lead is of our Cycler with the case to the right of it. It is the HUGE black blob to the right of the picture. I mean as in enormous. It has a large yellow sign on it stating “Medical Device” I assume for shipping on airlines etc.

In addition to our normal luggage for a week’s travel to a foreign land, we will have eight boxes devoted solely to dialysis supplies. Four of the boxes contain one night’s supply of Dialysate ( one 5L and one 3L bag), trash bag, sta-keeper, etc. Two boxes double this up. The strategy here is we will spend one night going and coming on the road (staying over in Springfield, MO) and two nights in Lafayette, IN for a total of four nights. The other boxes with dialysate are backups. We have one box of cassettes, and one box containing all the other supplies required for dialysis such as 2x2s, tape, cleaning liquids, towels, heparin, syringes, etc.

It is going to end up being quite a bit of “stuff” but needed for a week’s trip. Even if we had arranged for dialysate to be shipped to our hotel in Lafayette, we would still need the bulk of supplies to conduct PD on the road. Another thing, each night we use one of the single boxes it is one less box we have to haul in the BMW.

The picture at the end (our golden Dickens had to supervise the taking of the picture) shows where we stand at packing out some 4 days in advance. I will share our traveling experiences when we return. Meanwhile, I have written a week’s worth of blogs which will continue automatically (aren’t computers wonderful) while we journey up to our Nation’s Breadbasket.