Chills, Hypotension, and Painkillers: My latest misadventure with the new dialyzer syndrome!
It sucked yesterday while I was hooked-up at my machine cleaning my toxic blood for the reason that I suffered a complication about using a high flux dialyzer which actually had cut the cleaning time for about thirty minutes from the supposed to be four hours of treatment time of dialysis procedure. I actually felt it coming halfway or two hours after getting hooked-up to the dialysis machine and prior to that I was in great spirits because the head nurse is wise enough to cannulate (stick the needle into my arm's skin and into the big AV fistula" away from the scar tissue because I know that it will be easier to impede the bleeding after the needles are retracted out after the dialysis treatment ended compared to if it gets pricked by other nurse which doesn't care if I would bleed out white. So in that point you will already know if a nurse cares about you or not in that regard. Anyway so I thought that my dialysis treatment will get to be just like my other dialysis treatment sessions like when using the high flux dialyzer where I do not usually feel bad effects like the usual "chills" the we the patients quite experience all the time where sometimes I do not experience it myself but not yesterday after using a new high flux dialyzer again. Like I mentioned, half-way on my dialysis treatment time, I felt a considerable uneasiness which worried me a lot from that point and I was already suspecting that it could be another bout of chills associated with using a high flux dialyzer. I was already feeling cold to the point that it gets too cold to be comfortable with until I felt the "micro-trembling" happening already, so I already expecting that an know that impending "chills" will happen next.
And so it happened, from 12:00 p.m. I am already trying to resist the chills and I became restless already. Then a series of yawning struck me, it just means that my blood pressure is low enough for my brain to react to the lower oxygen supply caused by hypotension which is basically caused by the infection in my blood because of the dialyzer type which I am using which is a high flux dialyzer. It is different from other common type of dialyzer in which it has bigger pores where higher molecule toxins can pass out much easier compared to low flux dialyzer. That is why I always prefer it because I really needed to clean-out my blood much better even with a compromise of suffering form chills which is a reaction of the body from a temporary but difficult blood infection. It so happens because the blood gets infected by the dialysate solution which is used as a bath for the blood. In my dialysis clinic they only mix the bicarbonate powder and the pure filtered water, the "RO" water so the germs and toxins contained in that solution would enter the blood of the patient while being treated with dialysis using the high flux dialyzer in particular and it causes blood infection as a result. Anyway I managed to resist it until I cannot anymore, I have to call the nurse which was the one who hooked-me up to the the dialysis machine. It is because I am already feeling an impending hypotension which is the thing which I cannot possibly resist otherwise I will pass-out. I asked my nurse If she can just pause the treatment time because I am worrying about the remaining time which will get lost if she will return my blood for good, meaning that she will not re-hook me after I felt ok again. She told me that I have no more blood pressure again and she have to return it, but prior to that she offered me if I would like to use a brand name of a medicine which at first I cannot understand but later learned that it is an I.V. paracetamol which at first I refused to use as I had used a type of it before but regretted because it is just so expensive. But my nurse told me that it only cost less than a dollar in dollar value and so I told her ok. My hypotension improved immediately and later my chills also improved but I am already both feeling exhausted and my whole body is already feeling tired and exhausted and still feeling cold by the time I left the dialysis clinic to get back home. Anyway it is funny that the particular nurse has a business of offering the I.V. paracetamol for such common but untoward instances of high flux reaction use because what she is offering is what the patient needs in those times that they needed it and so she made some money right out from my misery which now I found to be both funny and wise.
After reaching home I still feel bad as if I am having a fever and worried that I can not eat the favorite food which I would always eat after my dialysis treatment session about thirty minutes after reaching home and settled again here on my bed. I waited until my condition improves a bit before I can eat but I haven't enjoyed the food compared before. Prior to that I asked my mother to give me a small tablet of Diclofenac as my preferred medicine of choice to alleviate body pain if I needed some relief from pain in some instances like what happened yesterday. I also asked my mother to give me piece of sliced bread because I needed to have the Diclofenac with some food so that I will not get an upset stomach. Oral NSAIDs are very acidic where some types of it actually injures the stomach lining even at first use and using it has a limitation because otherwise the individual will suffer stomach and intestine ulcerations as well as Kidney damage like what I had seen from my other co-patients as the main cause of why they became a dialysis patient themselves. Anyway I am more than sure that taking a small dose of Diclofenac will really improve my overall pain issue but it didn't worked immediately but I was able to manage to have some few hours of sleep out of exhaustion due to that chills which had worn me down considerably, so after eating I tried to sleep which I had and upon waking-up I felt much better with the pain no longer bothering me anymore thanks to the effects of Diclofenac. I also felt that my heart is not racing anymore which is associated with having dialysis especially if the blood flow rate or blood pump is faster which makes the heartbeat to go faster as well, for me it will go to normal levels when I catch some some sleep which in turn makes me feel better because my heart would be relaxed afterwards.
Upvoted! Thank you for supporting witness @jswit.