Sometimes life gives lemons
The last few days I've been dealing with a phenomenon that is only found in peritoneal dialysis patients. It's called drain pain. There are a few techniques that we use to get over it faster like drink a glass of water immediately, take some low-dose Tylenol, and move.
If that doesn't work, I go back to bed and rest for a couple of hours until the pain goes away. I talked to my doctor recently and he was a little worried about the pain. Plus in my case the drain pain started getting bad the last two days.
I thought nothing of it until yesterday I didn't do a full last drain.
For those who do not deal with peritoneal dialysis, I think I should stop and explain the process. First a catheter is inserted in the abdomen. After it heals-- the catheter is connected to a solution that fills the abdominal cavity. After two hours the solution is drained. I go through three of these fill-drain cycles a night.
Part of the process is that I drain more than the solution-- meaning that my body releases water. It's usually about 300-600 ml.
Anyway I didn't do a full last drain yesterday so when I woke up, I put on an empty bag to drain about 200 ml from my abdomen. Inside the drained solution was a fibrin.
Fibrin is a fibrous, non-globular protein involved in the clotting of blood. And is important for healing. But in my case, I don't want to heal the catheter or the process that I go through each night.
To counteract the fibrin from forming around my catheter causing the dialysis to be less efficient and more painful, I put heparin in my solution.
I was in some pain yesterday, so I drank a lot of lemon/honey tea which seems to help when I have this type of pain. And because I can't take ibuprofen, it does a much better job than acetaminophen.
Last night I put heparin in my bag and this morning "no drain pain." This may seem like there is no silver lining because I will probably have to use heparin tonight to make sure the fibrin is not forming.
But as a dialysis patient, finding out the problem and fixing it before I end up in the hospital is a win.