The Big D

All right -- the right side isn't my BEST side... but does anyone really HAVE a best side at 5:45 in the morning? LOL

I brought my niece's digital camera to document "a typical dialysis morning" (ah, so creative!), but when Dennis, the cute ex-LA tech guy pulled out the camera, I'd burned up the battery, darn it! (Sorry, Steph.) But I couldn't resist having him take one with my camera phone... (come on, one flirts where one can ;)

This is me in the chair/leather-bark-a-lounger, hooked up from my chest catheter to my "kidney" -- it's that pink plastic tubular thing on the right filled with a zillion coffee-like filters connected to both dark maroon (!) and white (saline) tubes.

It's funny -- I'm not queasy about looking at everybody's the tubes of warm blood (yeah, I know it's warm, because they clip the tubing to your shirt sleeve), but I still haven't seen my open "access," i.e. the catheter without the bandages. And even though there's all this red stuff floating around, I'm okay... except one time a few drops got on the white cloth they pin under the tubing near your chest -- and I saw it and I totally freaked out: "Get it off, get it off!"

Somehow I couldn't stomach seeing it that way, uncontained... it looked like an accident, yikes!

More details to come (and with more gory, gross photos too HAHAHA) --