Oh yes we did!

So, let me go back to Friday.

We'd run the second half of the week in clinic, because his access buttonholes were just being super finicky. Well, not both of them. I could easily stick the Arterial (the lower buttonhole, and the one that pulls blood out of his body to be cleaned.) but the Venous was really, truly not cooperating. Not at ALL. So anyhow... Friday...

Super Needle Nurse hung out with my while I was placing his needles, in case it just wasn't gonna happen. We hadn't successfully had two blunts in him in ages. AGES. So, I confidently head for his arterial, because it's easy peasy for me. Or it was. No dice. I prodded, literally, at the arterial for 20 minutes. Then, the FLASH! YAY! Finally!! Except no. The flash died. No dice. Okay. Pull the needle. Place a new one. Bang. In like Flynn, flushed, and taped.

Now, I'm feeling a little anxious because his venous (the upper, and the one that returns the clean blood to his body) has never liked me. Never. I swear it sees me coming with a blunt needle, laughs, and rolls away to hide under muscle or something. Great. It took me AGES to get the normally easy arterial line in, NOW it's time for the 'hard' one? Just great. My jaw is slightly clenched as I take the longer blunt needle provided (1.25 inches, versus the usual 1 inch) and brace myself to NOT get frustrated when this takes me 6 days. As I'm working this all through in my mind, I have the needle at about half it's length in his arm, when I am so shocked I almost jump in surprise. Flash? What? That just isn't possible. It just isn't. But yeah, that's really the flash I see, and I really should flush it, and hook him up to his fake kidney. And so, I do. I then proceed to yell so loud I startle other patients training in other rooms, and stroll out into the hall to make our training nurse come out from the room she's in to fist bump me. Yeah. I was pretty damn happy.

Saturday, we are not doing dialysis, because his arm is rather sore from my marathon rooting around session. So, the plan is to stick him anyway, without running dialysis, just to keep the tunnels open and such. And then, that night, to make a batch of dialysate in the PureFlow so that on Sunday we can give it a whirl on our own.

Well, the needles didn't get stuck Saturday. Okay. Not the worst. It'll be okay, right? Of course. Uh huh. Yeah.

Saturday night, I make up a handy dandy batch of dialysate, and Sunday, I set the machine up. The entire time I'm setting the machine up, I'm pretty sure I'm going to be wasting this entire set up. And that tomorrow, we'll be back down at Wellbound trying to get his silly access working.

So down I sit, supplies at the ready, he gets as comfy as he can, and I work on the Arterial. Nope. Nothing. Nada, zip, zilch. After ten good minutes of poking around, I decide to take a break from searching for this one, and work on the Venous. Cause Friday had to be a fluke. But no. Venous, in in 10 seconds. Okay. Back to the Arterial. What? In? Seriously? Freakin A. Flush em both, grab my set up, and away we GO.

We did a complete run, I managed to get his vitals and numbers every half hour like I'm supposed to, and we took him off when we finished the dialysate prescription (25 Litres). No blood spurts, nothing exciting at all. :)

Holy cow, it felt GREAT. :)