My center allows patients to have visitors (some centers don’t) but they must wear paper gowns to cover their street clothes while they visit with the patient. Sometimes it’s a short visit but there are also visitors who stay the entire 3 or 4 hours with the patient. They watch TV or sit and talk with the patient for most of the time. In a center in Ohio, a party of regular, full-time visitors has formed a group of their own. Rather than sit in the treatment area, they hang out in the waiting room and they make the best of their time together by becoming a little family of their own.
What’s really noteworthy about this gathering is how it is also a support group. While they enjoy each other’s company in a social context, they discuss their problems and share solutions to those problems. I’m pleased the CantonRep.com in Stark County, Ohio wrote about this.
I am a person with ESRD (End Stage Renal Disease) which means my kidneys don't work. Forty or so years ago that would have been a death sentence but today there is Dialysis which means I could be hooked up to a machine that would clean my blood as the kidneys should. Three days a week, I went to a dialysis center and had too very large needles stuck in my arm to remove and replace my blood as it passed through a process where it was cleaned and the fluid was removed, a process taking a little over four hours each time.
In November 2017, I received a kidney transplant from a deceased donor. My life went into overdrive. With a "new" functioning kidney, I no longer had to go to a dialysis center and my days were not open to be lived rather than recovering from dialysis which meant dialyzing for three days and resting for 4 days a week. I work full-time and often 50 hours per week. It is something I never imagined. I highly recommend it! HeeHee
I want to advance knowledge about dialysis and transplant so that others can learn from my experience and mistakes. We shouldn't have to reinvent the wheel, eh? There is so much to be learned and experienced about our predicament. There are vast resources available to support us and enrich our lives but many patients don't know about them. There are also many issues that we have to deal with whether we want to or not. So I blog about them in www.DevonTexas.com
All comments are confidential until I approve them. If you don't want your comment public, let me know and I will respect that. So, feel free to leave a comment.
I also blog in LegacyTales in WordPress if you are interested in the ramblings of a Old Man. Give a peek and let me know what you think. https://legacytales.wordpress.com/
Enjoy.
A podcast where I invite guests from all walks of life to discuss their favorite movies, and we use that film as a starting point to talk about deeper issues such as faith, politics, and social issues.
DevonTexas 
Reblogged this on kidneystoriesblog and commented:
Gotta read this from Devon Texas