My monthly meeting this past Friday with my dialysis team is worth more than just passing comment. We covered the points I had previously provided my dialysis nurse and then some. To wit:
- Why the RenaPlex-D was not on order? Seems my renal doctor had taken a couple of weeks’ vacation and while she was gone no one could sign the prescription. Now that she is back, that has been taken care of. I should be receiving the vitamins in due course.
- Am I still on injections of B12 and Testosterone or not? The rub here centers around my most recent lab reading of Hemoglobin which was up to 14.5; the lab goal is 10-11.0, and my doc gets uneasy when it’s above 14.0. She posits that perhaps testosterone injections could lead to this increase and thus stop this shot. Secondly, during my last labs, my need for B12 was checked and it was found that currently my B12 is dead in the middle of the desirable range and thus the need for B12 injections is moot.
- My last wKt/V reading was 2.29 which Fresenius rounds to 2.3. I quizzed my doc with such a robust reading, perhaps we could cut back on my Liberty Cycler dwell times from 2 hours per cycle to 1 hr 45 minuses which would knock an hour total off the time I’m on the cycler. Keep in mind with overhead mainly caused by drain time, I was spending over 11 hours per day just hooked up to the cycler. Add the setup and tear-down times to this and I was easily spending over 12 hours per day just doing cycler treatment. Add everything involved in my afternoon manual 2-liter fill, and you can see dialysis consumed the vast majority of my 24-hour day allotted. Luckily, she agreed to this with the stipulation that if it didn’t work out, that is my next adequacy test went too far south, we would go back to the previous 2-hour dwell to which I agree.
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