Tuesday, December 13, 2011

The devil's in the diet

It has been a dreary week. Mostly because I was placed on the strictest of diets by my medical people when they caught sight of my blood test results last Tuesday.

No coffee, no chocolate, limited fruit, limited veg, only a drop of milk daily, no potatoes, no chips, no crisps, no sauces, no alcohol, no processed meats, no nuts, no dried fruit, no herbs, absolutely no bananas or avocadoes.

Those were my orders. Which begs the seasonally appropriate question:

Do they know it's christmas time at all?

I went along with it, of course. It was the repetition of the term "we need to keep you safe" by more than one of them that sufficiently frightened me into submission.

The potassium is the thing. It's high right now, and while I can cope with the far-off possibility of a slow, painful death, the fear of going out like a light because of a fatal irregular heart rhythm challenges the rebel in me, quietens my rage against the medical machine.

I'm in the hospital again tomorrow, for repeat tests. If the word back from the lab is no better, there's talk of putting me up to ten hours a night on dialysis.

If that hurdle presents itself, I am looking at 70 hours of treatment each week, and I have to wonder if at that point it might make more sense to consider haemo-dialysis.

Would I not be better off going into the hospital every other day for four hours of dialysis? Could I bear to have a fistula in my arm? Could I live with quitting work, to quietly and finally ceding to this illness for once and for all?

These are all the questions that will await me in the next new year of groundhog waiting-for-transplant days.

For now, I'll settle for improved results tomorrow and being allowed back on one coffee per day.

Happy Christmas Reg.

3 comments:

  1. Great post I must say. Simple but yet entertaining and engaging... Keep up the good work.

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  2. Entertaining? What? I wonder if the last commenter actually read this post.

    Hope you're ok, mind yourself...

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  3. Sakina - I always aim to entertain, even if the news I'm carrying isn't great. I guess that's why I process information, then blog, rather than process and collapse. Thanks for your comment.

    Radge - We have talked. You know the story.

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