We converted our garage 3 years ago for the kids to use as a games room - now we've reclaimed half of the room to use for dialysis.
The contractor surveyed our home and was very positive about there being enough space and having really easy access to water and electrical supplies.
They will need to bring water into the games room but thankfully the downstairs toilet is immediately behind the wall. The waste will also go through the wall and amazingly our toilet already has the facility to connect an additional waste pipe into the sewer - easy!
There is also a need to connect up a new electric circuit for the dialysis machine but that's easy too as there is already a route from the electric box to the room.
The contractor needs the next two weeks to setup a home dialysis training room at the hospital but once that's done he will plan to come and do the work at our house in readiness for our equipment. He says it will only take a day to get us all setup.
We will start training in the home dialysis trainng room as soon as its available. Joy already sets up the machine, connects the pipes and dialyser filter. She also inserts my needles (which are now blunt needles :s) and completes my paper work and then removes everything from the machine when I finish. But we have a few extra things to learn and become competent in before we can go home.
My machine has been ordered from Germany and we are being setup for monthly deliveries of supplies. We will get special weekly waste collections from the city council to take away machine waste pipes and used filters and also sharps bins.
The dialysis provider will be contacting the water, electric, gas and telephone suppliers to our home to inform them that we need to be listed as critical users who require constant supply for my 'life saving treatment'. This ensures they notify us of any service disruption and check we are ok with it. It also means if there is an unexpected outage our street will be top priority to have service restored ahead of other areas.
We are getting HDF dialysis which is significantly better than standard haemodialysis - not many UK home haemo services can offer this. If we'd taken a service from Bristol we'd not have got HDF.
HDF has an additional process to standard haemo which takes extra fluid off my blood as it goes around the machine and replaces it with fresh perfectly balanced fluid. This means extra nasty toxins get removed and I get to feel much better. It does require extra equipment such as a reverse osmosis water filter (whatever that is!) plus the water needs to be comprehensively filtered to make it clinically sterile.
I am hoping I will be able to dialyse more than three times a week as you get the best results from dialysis during he first two hours. So instead of 3 lots of 4 hours I will aim to do 4 lots of 3 hours or 5 lots of 2 1/2 hours. I have to do a minimum of 12 hours per week with a minimum of 3 sessions.
It will be great to have the flexibility of being able to dialyse whenever I like instead of being tied to fixed times. This should give me a massive amount of freedom back :)
Dialysing more often also means some of my fluid and diet restrictions can be relaxed. I'm looking forward to being able to drink more than 1 ltr per day although I won't be rushing to eat more vegetables!
I should be home dialysing in time for Christmas - a brilliant Christmas present!
I'm really really well at the moment and loving life. Working hard at work and spending evenings and weekends developing the church computer network. From next week I'm planning to work 4 hours Monday, 8 hours Tuesday and Thursday and 4 hours Friday so a total of 24 hours. Will go up to full days on Monday and Friday in the new year once home dialysis is all up and running.
Thanks agin to everyone for your support. Keep praying.
Rob & Joy
