What is peritoneal dialysis?

I have this terrible process that I habitually go through with new information: 1) learn it, 2) immediately believe that I've always known it, and 3) wonder what's wrong with everyone else who doesn't seem to know it. This is the process I've gone through with peritoneal dialysis, but I think it's high time that I explain what it is and how it works using the simple layman's terms in which I understand it. If you are a medical professional, please refrain from judging my imperfect education and from harshly correcting any inaccuracies. In fact, maybe you should just stop reading now. For the rest of you, here is what I understand the process to be:

There are essentially two kinds of dialysis: hemodialysis and peritoneal dialysis[1] (hereafter referred to as hemo and PD, respectively).

Hemodialysis. Hemo is what most people have heard of/seen, and it's what they think of when they think of dialysis.

The journey continues…

It’s been a few weeks now since I started doing dialysis overnight and it has definitely gotten a lot better (praise the Lord!), especially in the last couple of days. The day after I wrote my last post, my doctor called and I told him about my strong dislike for dialysis thus far due to pain and lack of sleep. He recommended a few things so we took the dialysis machine back up to the dialysis center so that they could change the settings to something called “Tidal PD”. They also looked at the exit site for my catheter and thought it looked like it was trying to get infected so they had me start an antibiotic. Right before I started the antibiotic, my stomach was really sore for a few days, so much so that I couldn’t really use my abs at all. After I started the antibiotic, that pain went away, so I’m thinking that I had a tunnel infection, which is the area including the first few inches of the catheter underneath the skin. Anyway, the antibiotic is done now and I think my exit site looks and feels a lot better. I even got to take my first shower since the surgery yesterday! After a month without showering, it was kind of fun to wash my own hair! (Thanks to my hair stylist friend Kelly for washing my hair at the salon over the last month…you’ll have lots of free babysitting after little baby Skrap comes in the next week or two!)

Also, since the change to Tidal PD, I am only waking up once or twice in the night from the pain instead of five or six times. Unfortunately, there was air in the line last week, which went inside me and since air rises, it goes straight to the shoulders and is quite painful.