Dialysis has brought a major change in that scenario. Sure, I can still achieve the darkness, but silence is a long-gone pleasure. For the 9 1/2-10 1/2 hours that I am doing therapy, the machine chugs, glugs, squirts, hums, buzzes, slurps, and farts continuously. One 6-litre bag sets on the heater to warm it up before it's injected into my peritoneum. A 5-litre bag and a 2-litre bag set on the therapy table. All 13 litres pass into my body during the night, and 11 pass out and are squirted into the 5-gallon drain jug, which I empty into the bath tub or the toilet in the morning. The remaining 2 litres I carry around with me all day until they're drained out at the beginning of therapy that night. So solution is always moving--into me, out of me, into the bag on the heater, into the drain jug. It's a lot of chug-a-lugging.
I have tried ear plugs and kleenex in my ears and pillows over my head. I've also tried to buffer the noise by putting two lap quilts under the machine so that it doesn't wiggle against the therapy table. I once put quilts over the machine, then thought better of it: The heater could easily burn the quilt and start a fire. All this helps a little, but not nearly enough.
Add to this the alarms. For the first few months I was on dialysis, I'd get up to five alarms a night. Perhaps I had rolled over on the tubing, and the solution could not enter or exit my body. Or the tubing got kinked inside me, something that is usually corrected by shifting position. Or the tubing at the bag became occluded. Or the machine just wanted to disrupt my sleep. Then I'd have to call tech support because the instructions in the manual as to how to correct the problem were always wrong. The techs would always say, "Oh, no, don't do that. Do this," and they'd give me some tip about stroking the back side of the cassette before inserting it into the machine or lifting the bag on the heater and folding it in half. All things that were never mentioned in the manual. Just another frustration in this whole process--a manual full of erroneous information.
Now that I finally have the tricks that I should have been given during my initial training back in February 2009, the alarms do not go off as frequently. But at least once a week, and this past week five times, the alarm goes off. Rarely do I see why. I just scroll down to bypass and then the alarm sounds again, so I bypass again. That usually shuts the thing up.
The reason why I don't do manual exchanges is because I'd have to do three or four exchanges a day. Upon waking, I'd have to set up my IV pole and let the solution that had been dwelling inside me all night drain out, then let 2 fresh litres drain in. At 1 p.m. and 6 p.m., I'd have to do the same thing. Then before bed I'd do the fourth exchange. Since each manual exchange takes about an hour, when you include setup and cleanup, that means I'm basically doing little else with my day than dialysis. No thanks.
If I were sleeping with someone, then I'd consider manual exchanges. I get caught up in all the tubing myself. I can't imagine the mess that might ensue if I were having sex while doing dialysis. Perhaps the best solution would be hemodialysis. That way I'd just go into a clinic three times a week and be done with it. But hemodialysis is unappealing for other reasons: depressing to see patients at the clinic who aren't taking care of themselves and who are in worse shape than I am, the difficulty of travel, letting someone else be responsible for my health, my distaste of IVs.
Sometimes I close my eyes and remember hearing tree frogs at my cabin in Point Arena or the rush of a river near a place where I was camping or the wind in the trees. These are the sounds I want to experience again just before I fall off to sleep, not the obnoxious farting of a dialysis machine.
