therenalunit.com

I’m interested to see how many days people dialyse in different parts of the world. So I’ve added a poll to the left sidebar of the page. If you happen to drop by, and are on dialysis, why not head over and vote in the poll?

Cheers

Stu

Bizarre I know, but today is a sort of anniversary for me. (If I have my claculations correct)

One of my favourite albums from the early nineties was Arrested Development’s 3 Years 5 Months & 2 Days in the Life of–, as of today, I’ve spent four years, four months, and four days on dialysis since my transplant failed.

Some interesting statistics:

In that time I have spent roughly 3,602 hours sitting in the chair

Had four hospital stays

Had two surgical procedures

Had three blown needles

Lost one mind (If someone finds this, please let me know)

I came across an interesting article at EurekAlert.org today.

Apparently, most altruistic kidney donors end up out of pocket by their generous act.

Generally, the medical costs are covered by private or public insurance, but there are other costs involved, such as travel and convalescence.

This seems crazy, and would act as a major disincentive to potential donors.

“Here, slice me up, take one of my major organs, then stitch me up - oh, and here’s my credit card, charge me a couple of grand whilst you’re at it”

I don’t think so!

I think that governments should offer financial incentives to potential organ donors. Not just to ensure that the act doesn’t cost them money, but to be of actual financial benefit to the donor. With the cost of dialysis rapidly spiralling out of control, this would actually be of long term financial benefit to the country.

Jonathan has written about this here, apparently we can now transplant organs into people with completely different blood types.

Of course, this was done for the first time here in Australia (where all the smart people live!).

It’s an interesting read, and there was a bit of fuss here in the media a week or so ago when this was publicised.

I can tell you one thing for sure though - I wouldn’t want to be the first to try this if it didn’t work!

In the never ending quest to turn a profit from my misery, NephroCare Asia (Fresenius) have decided that it’s too expensive to provide a blanket to keep me warm at dialysis.

Now this wouldn’t be an issue if they didn’t insist on running my machine at 36 degrees C, but that’s a story for another day.

I’ve bitched a bit in the past about the cost of health insurance here in Australia, and whether it’s worth having in the context of undertaking private dialysis, and small things like this just validate my point.

There comes a point where, in the drive for profitability, the differentiation between private and publicly funded dialysis becomes so small that there’s no benefit in consumers shelling out the (not inconsiderable) funds for the private insurance.

This point is rapidly being reached in Australia. Care needs to be taken by the private dialysis providers that they understand the reason for their existence - providing a service of a higher level, with greater comforts than the public system. If the private providers do not realise this, they will find themselves with patients who don’t consider the private units worth the expense, and they will just move back into the publicly funded system.

Apparently, the potassium meter does exist.

It’s called the Cardy Potassium Ion Meter, and you can read about it here.

Whilst not specifically designed for dialysis patient, this piece of kit looks like it would do the job.

The unit is available here

At a price of around $US239, it might be out of the reach of the average dialysis patient, but it’s nice to know that such a product actually does exist.