Last Friday night as I was getting ready for the bed the power went hard down. This is the first time in the 17 or so months I have been on PD that this has happened. I thought I had my basis covered but soon discovered I did not. Let me expand.
I have a UPS (Unirruptuable Power Supply) on my dialysis machine of sufficient capacity that it should be capable of keeping the machine up electrically for over an hour. I had already done all the setup requirements on the cycler up to the point of hooking up in prep for bed. When the power dropped so did power to the cycler. Mistake #1: It turns out there are two rows of outlets on the back of the UPS. One row is “Surge” protected, the other is backed up by the internal circuits and battery of the UPS. I had inadvertently plugged the cycler into the Surge strip rather than the backup strip so when power dropped so did the cycler. This is an obvious easy thing to fix – just swapped where the cycler was plugged into the UPS to the proper plugs. I subsequently tested UPS by pulling out the power cord and the cycler stayed running on the UPS so now we’re proven good. Point for you, check and double-check your systems.
Screwup#2: I had never experienced a power outage while the cycler had been set up previously. I erroneously thought it would come back up to where it had been. Wrong. I kept booting it up and waiting for it to return to the previous readiness state to no avail. It wasn’t until I started paying close attention to what the screen was telling me that I noticed it was instructing me, in red letters no less, to remove the cassette. When I did this, the boot returned to normal and I was able to proceed with the cycler setup all over again. But wait, all is yet to return to normal.
Screwup #3.: When I pulled the cassette, I placed it on the bottom shelf of the cycler stand. When I attempted to reinstall the previously installed cassette, the membranes were bloated with fluid and there was no way it could be installed. Additionally, fluid was leaking out of hoses onto the bedroom carpeting which had never happened before. Now I had a mess on my hands. I was attempting to install a new cassette, the old one was making a wet mess for some reason, and I noticed the 5 L fluid bag on the heater was depleted. Where it disappeared to I’m still not certain. Of course, my wife thought it had gone on the carpeting and twice woke me up during drain cycles checking it out. We think it went into the two other 5 L bags hung on the side which in turn was used normally during the night. I replaced the top bag on the heater before restarting the setup. I don’t know where the first bag went.
t
Leave a Reply