Thursday, January 3, 2013

Crisis? What crisis?

    I dropped Dad off at dialysis today with an unusual absence of any problem. They called him back (which is to say from the waiting area to the dialysis area) before he could even sit down, which is very unusual and really great. I went home and heated up my lunch and started eating. Not far in, I got a call from Margaret. The dialysis facility had called her instead of me for some reason. She said that I had to go back and pick Dad up, but she couldn't understand quite why. I called the facility straight away and the office manager said that my dad was clotting and that he had an appointment with Vascular in the morning.
    Now if you're paying attention to our adventures, you know that he has a clot in his leg that nobody but me seems all that concerned about. I pretty much make up for the rest of them, though. So this news alarmed me greatly. However, when I got there, I found that he had clotting around his access (the point on his arm where they hook up the dialysis machine) so they couldn't dialyse him. This has happened before; just not at the very start of a dialysis session. So we have to go to the nephrologists roughly at dawn to get it cleaned out, and he can't eat after midnight. (Presumably, he turns into a gremlin if he does.)
    When the access is cleaned out, they'll probably be able to fit him in for dialysis on the wrong day. The interesting question becomes whether they will insist on him coming back on his regular day, Saturday, as well. Bets are that they will; he seemed resigned to it. I'm hoping sanity will prevail, but we'll have to see. The point is that what sounded like an immense scary crisis turned out to be nothing of the kind, just a slightly unusual incident. I can live with it.

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