Fluid dynamics

When you’re on kidney dialysis you develop a fixation for drinks. It’s just like when you’re on a diet and you cut out chocolate and chips – all you crave is chocolate and chips. Well when you’re on a fluid restriction (1 litre ... 1000 mls ... 1¾ pints ... not very much) you crave a drink and it sucks. See, the first verb that popped into my head was ‘to suck’.

There’s fluid in just about everything you eat never mind drink – fruit, veggies, pasta, rice, soup, ice-cream, custard, gravy, jelly, yogurt – you need to be aware of the fluid content and count that into your allowance. It's like shooting the rapids.

The renal diet is also pretty restrictive especially when combined with a diabetic diet but the food has always been the least of my worries. You can buy sugar free alternatives for most things, you can take tablets to absorb much of the phosphates in meat, dairy, soy, fish, nuts, etc, you can find lower potassium fruits & veg or boil them into submission but you just can’t get drinks that are low in H2O.

Just lately I've been drowning in fluid insults, here's a few that have been floating around lately.

What’s worse than having a UTI? Having a UTI when you don’t have much U in the first place and you can't drink buckets of Robinson's Barley Water to flush it out.

As if being diabetic and having kidney failure isn’t enough, I’m starting to experience problems with me women’s bits as I get older so I have to have an ultrasound in a couple of days just to make sure I don’t have fibroids or worse. The appointment letter said I should drink 1 pint of fluid an hour before the scan and arrive with a full bladder. Ha! I could drink a gallon of water (I could, really) but hardly any is going to make it through to my bladder.

I have a follow-up appointment with the gynaecologist a couple of days after the scan. The appointment letter said to bring an early morning sample of urine. Lucky they don’t say how big the sample should be but I might be able to manage a couple of teaspoonsful.

And who says Germans don’t have a sense of humour? Not only do they engineer terrific cars and roads to drive them on, they are also the world leaders in making dialysis machines. A company called Fresenius actually owns many of the dialysis units in the UK, they are staffed with NHS nurses & doctors but Fresenius provide the consumables, facilities and the training.

Some of their newer machines have fancy alarms that sound when you’ve finished your session, mine being an older one it just says boop-boop-boop over and over which is unimaginative but functional. When I had my line changed last week I had to dialyse at Addenbrooke’s and the machine I used was one of the newer ones. When I finished it started to play a movement from Handel’s Water Music. If that isn’t taking the piss I don’t know what is.