Flashback
Along the lines of excellent doctors who care about their patients, here is an entry from after my very first dialysis treatment (which was on a Saturday):
My nephrologist, Dr. H., called the dialysis unit to ask how I was doing, and to let me know he was thinking about me-what a guy!
I was also talking to the nurse from the Nephrology clinic today, and she said that Dr. H felt bad about having to start me on dialysis with how good I still look; it’s a much easier decision when the patient is symptomatic. It’s just that my labs got so much worse, that he couldn’t let it go any longer. I’m just looking at it as being a temporary situation, until a kidney comes along.
For those who weren’t following my blog back then, I had an episode of extreme flank pain, which was most likely a ruptured cyst, followed by a presumed infection of a kidney cyst (they are very difficult to diagnose; my urine culture was negative, but I had a high fever and chills). My creatinine was around 7.7 and BUN ~90 prior to this, and they went up to ~12 and 118, hence the dialysis.
