therenalunit.com

The Renal Unit Website has undergone a complete facelift, adding new features which I think renal patients and carers will find useful

So what’s new?

• A smooth new look
• It now pulls in blog feeds from lots of renal bloggers onto the home page so you can keep up to date with all the renal bloggers. If you have a blog about your life on dialysis and your posts aren’t appearing, drop me an email and I’ll add your blog
• All the latest News from the renal world is still there, updated every hour
• I’m opening up the site to new bloggers. Want to start blogging about your experiences as an ESRD patient or carer? The Renal Unit is now the place, you’ll get a free Wordpress blog with a customised theme and free lifetime hosting, and lifetime help and support with your blogging adventures

There’s a lot more to come, too. Over the next few months the site will be transformed from a bloke with some articles and a blog, to a community of bloggers and people keen to soak up the latest information and thoughts going on in the renal blogosphere.

(I won’t be adding a forum, I Hate Dialysis does a pretty good job of that already)

Check it out!

The new renal blogs page, updated every hour with the latest posts from people blogging about dialysis, renal transplants, ESRD, and everything in between.

See it in action at http://therenalunit.com/renalblogs.php, bookmark it, and visit it often.

Got a blog about your experiences with ESRD that’s not on the list? Send me an email at stuart@therenalunit.com, and I’ll hook you up!

So it’s more than six months since I received my wonderful new kidney.

….and I haven’t been back to the dialysis centre to clean out my locker, much less visit the people I spent so much time with there.

What’s up with that?

My wife keeps nagging me to go back and visit the people I dialysed with. I just don’t seem to be able to do it. When I was on dialysis, I used to joke with the nurses:

When I get my transplant, you’ll never see me again. I’ve spent enough time here for a hundred lifetimes.

Of course, at the time, I was joking, but now that the time has come, I simply refuse to go. Don’t get me wrong, I liked the people at dialysis. Maybe they weren’t the kind of people I would choose to socialise with, but we were all making the best of a bad situation, and hence got along reasonably well.

I think part of the reason I can’t bring myself to go back is my memories of when people I’d dialysed with got transplants, and came back to visit. I always (obviously misguidedly) thought that they were coming back to gloat. Whilst this was clearly not the case, I’d still pretend to be asleep to avoid the uncomfortable conversation:

Me: So How’s it going?

Them: Fifteen minute summary of every blood test they’d ever had since the transplant, plus a summary of all the things they could now do / eat / drink that they couldn’t before (and I still couldn’t do)

Me: Cool

Them: So what about you?

Me: Same shit, different day.

Uncomfortable silence

Them: Cool, well, better go talk to (insert name of patient on my left)

I just have more respect for the daily struggle in these people’s lives to put them through something like that.

It would appear that the viral infection I was fighting was the dreaded Influenza A.

No wonder I felt so bloody dreadful!

One thing I did find interesting is that, even during Influenza season here in Australia, and even though I’m an immunosuppressed renal transplant recipient, influenza test are only done weekly here in Adelaide.

Wierd.

I’ve been down with a viral infection bug type tbhing the last couple of weeks. Spiking temperatures up to 39.5 degrees celsius, generally feeling like shit.

The wierd thing is that all my bloods are good, except my haemoglobin has dropped by over 20 points from 155 to 132. I’m not sure what that’s all about, as my white cell count shows no sign of infection

Basically haven’t been at the computer in that time, other than to check emails.

Hopefully be back in business with all the blogs as of tomorrow.

I was at my local chicken shop last night, waiting for my order, when I couldn’t help but feel someone was watching me.

As I scanned the room , I noticed a man, about 50 years old, staring at my arm.

“Ah, the fistula”, I thought.

I seem to almost have grown a new arm on top of my left arm, as the fistula seems to have taken on a life of its own (it’s humungous!). I don’t mind my friends and family ribbing me about it, but I take great offence at people I don’t know staring at it.

I tend to float between two different attitudes to my fistula. When my confidence is a bit low, I tend to wear long sleeved tops to hide it, but when I’m feeling good about myself, I seem to care less what people think, and just wear whatever I feel like.

The problem is that when I find myself in a situation like I did last night, it shoots my confidence to bits, and I find myself trying to hide the fistula.

Then I get angry at myself for allowing someone else to dictate how I feel about myself, then I get angry at the other person for making me feel like this.

Arrrgh!