These past few weeks I am experiencing shoulder pain because maybe my body is just changing again and from what path I don't know which is why I can't sleep on my left side of the body lately for the reason that I might make it worse. However sleeping on my back gives me a better quality sleep but I am still adjusting unlike if I were to sleep on my side, then I would wake-up with sweats and feeling that I am quite breathless with a bit racing heart although I associate it with already too much fluids in my system. So it is one reason that I eventually used Diclofenac again prior to my dialysis session yesterday at the time of this writing. But with just a little dose I felt a tremendous relief and I told myself, wow, this feels like how to feel normal, well at least near it and it made me think that I am a person dealing with a constant torture more than I guess a third if not my whole life already if I would take an account the years of being in battle with sickness and disease. But I have to still fight because it i still nice to live particularly if you are loved even by a few people in your life and with God in your heart and soul, a million thanks to God. I am just stuck to this body where there are now many dead ends on where I want to go because even if I will have the resources, it is just impossible to fix my body plus also I resent the fact that my dialysis quality had been modified and it added up to the misery in my life because I feel more toxic inside considering that I am eating a small amount of foods just to minimize the build-up of some more toxins which would add to the level of toxins not getting washed-out as it should. But I am still optimistic that this new status quo will soon change when the law which will soon raised in congress, senate, and ultimately signed by the president of my country to become a law, it will make me have the means of choosing my dialysis center of choice because the payment coming from my health insurance for my dialysis God-willing will get doubled and will be enough to cover the expensive copay which is high which prevents me from being able to transfer in other dialysis clinics which I believe has a better service compared to the current clinic that I am getting my treatments from. I believe that God is working and hearing the supplications and requests through prayers of other patients and myself to help us because dialysis is a lifetime process, it extends our lives and all that we can hope for is to get the best treatment possible so that we can achieve the best well-being that we deserve because it is just a pure hardship if we don't like in my case where my treatment is "modified" and this making me feel so toxic all the time.
This past morning prior for my dialysis treatment, I was already contemplating about the onset of another possible symptoms of an impending chills which happens when dialysis patients use highflux dialyzer. Chills is something to be noted for because it accompanies pain in the body like if you have a numb part of your skin, it will feel like it has a slicing type of pain, or your back will be in pain, or it can be your hands or even your thumb for that matter and it is uncomfortable to say the least. Restlessness happens too until hypotension occurs or it may not and only chills will develop where sometimes it is accompanied by headaches which varies in intensity. I had experienced all the in combination of symptoms where sometimes the chill is great enough that I will shiver for sometime and given a paracetamol tablet or worse, asked to buy a 500 peso worth of Paracetamol in I.V. form which sometimes I will allow to get rid of that shivering which is sapping my energy in the process. In the end you feel so tired and it also ruined the cleaning process of your blood and then going home as if you still have a fever and at the same time you also lost your appetite too. The last time that I had a complication brought about using a highflux dialyzer was about seven dialysis sessions ago because it was the moment or day of the first use of the said dialyzer. I thought that one tablet of Paracetamol will be enough for me to evade the chills but what happens was I felt quite restless and pain appeared just what I had just described above, and then I felt lightheaded until my blood pressure went down so fast that I have to lift my two legs up before the nurses put a box below it so that it can help me recover from an "elevator down" blood pressure and at the same time telling my request for one of my senior dialysis nurses to stop treatment and return my blood quickly because I know that upon stopping the dialysis treatment temporarily and returning my blood from the "bloodlines" will immediately improve my hypotensive crisis. It is not the same for other patients though and in the end if the nurses are not quick enough to respond, then for sure fatalities will happen. We must consider that nurses are not our family and they don't care much if we live or die to be honest and that they became desensitized into what happens inside a dialysis center. Most of them just wants to get experiences so that they can be able to work abroad where there are greener pastures for them to graze upon which is actually their target goal to achieve in the first place. It is the reason that I am always praying that a nurse dealing with me has a heart and the ability to know the intricacies around dialysis treatment and how it should feel because all of them really has no idea what it feels like to get dialyzed normally within standards and what they think on how it should go. I also resent the fact that most dialysis nurses have no judgement of their own and are just relying on one figure like they are just tentacles of that figure forever but it happens and patients are just lucky to land in the perfect dialysis center because it is a fact that dialysis centers here in my country has their own process in cleaning patient's blood.
I am glad that my nurses are swift to respond to my request because suffering from a severe hypotension like that which is very unusual to happen to me is scary and hard because it literally make your guts to revolution until you soil your undies while at the same time passing-out either temporarily of permanently and thus making you to rest in peace forever. Yes that is how scary it will go if your nurses have no clue how to take action for such a very critical situation because it may mean life or death for the patient. Just recently a dialysis patient died from where I said that I want to transfer to because it is "almost free" in the sense that I will not have to copay on top of the payment of my universal health care health insurance. But I was not able to be granted because of my liver issue and so I was rejected. Anyway, since the nurses there are still new, I guess that the are still not having enough experience when such emergency cases of complications happens to a patient while undergoing hemodialysis most particularly when a fast type of hypotension happens which actually happened to a patient there and it cost the patient his life. Well because of that it is not really easy to be a dialysis patient because one of your leg is already inside the grave depending on your individual condition and how you are being treated by what dialysis team or where can also determine how you will last in this probably the worst health situation because of the said complications alone not to mention the effects on your whole life in all aspects like financially, physically, psychologically, mentally, socially,, your plans, wants, goals, etc. is affected while forcing you to be with people which sometimes you do not want to mingle with.
Anyway, my anxiety over using a new dialyzer made me to think to use diclofenac prior to being hooked-up at dialysis this past morning. It is because that Diclofenac is also anti-pyretic which means that it also combats the dreaded "chills". What is special about this type of analgesic which is classified as an NSAID was its "half-life" or the time of its efficacy which for me lasts about more than a day unlike Paracetamol which can be washed-out by the dialysis process. That is why the last time that I used a highflux dialysis in its first use instance is that I experienced the hypotension about an hour and a half after being hooked-up leading me to believe that the paracetamol's effects didn't prevent the infection symptom all throughout my session. The chills by the way is a symptom of blood infection as foreign bodies, dirt, bacteria, toxins, etc. from the dialysate solution in hemodialysis would penetrate the porous membranes of the high flux dialyzer which has bigger pores compared to lowflux dialyzers and it enters the blood causing symptoms especially chills if not hypotension or both or the combination of other symptoms as well. Anyway, I did took small tablet of Diclofenac which I believe would last longer while I am hooked-up for my session to protect me from such a thing from happening again. Well I guess that it was a successful solution which is good news for me but I did took a tablet of Paracetamol in order to help me with warding off that complication which actually can happen every instance that I would get hooked-up again for my session because I am always using a highflux dialyzer for the purpose of its good cleaning action to the blood because it has a bigger pores where bigger molecules of toxins can easily pass through unlike if a dialysis patient is just using the lowflux type.
Living with pain is very uncomfortable, and you have described very well everything you have to do to stay on your feet; there is no machine that calculates the level of pain we can suffer. I hope the laws in your country change so that you can have the treatment that makes you feel better. I suffer a little from the pain in my left shoulder and I felt very identified when you described the discomfort of not being able to sleep well.... I send you my best wishes and I hope you can somehow manage your ailments in a better way.
I was lucky that I was able to manage my pain so that now I am not much tortured by it compared to years ago but I still suffer from it for the reason that factors that causes it is still present. It is not only the main thing which makes my life harder because I also have to endure toxins which are still elevated in my body and it causes lots of issues for me like being unable to eat normally. I also have to endure my marked weakness and my immobility which forces me to lay down on my back because I cannot do anything physically anymore so it causes me to feel frustration because my life had been focused already in surviving and not living normally.
However I have God in my heart and I believe that this life is just temporary although I still want to improve my life because really we can only live once in this world but we must focus with the new world and that is to live in paradise with God where there are no more pain and all these negativities associated with our life on earth where we can also suffer from the problems of countries far from us which is now making our lives harder economically, etc.
I know that living with pain is difficult, I suffer from it since my youth because of my gout pains (a lot of bouric acid), and because of the siatic nerve: I know that your pain levels are stronger; I hope that the evolution of medicine and your treatments will improve, as well as the laws in your country. Don't stop writing and transmuting that pain.