Have any of you switched from daily to nocturnal dialysis?
We were talking with the nephrologist about switching from daily to nocturnal. It turns out that there is nobody in our area doing nocturnal. what clinics are offering nocturnal? Do they require remote monitoring? If not, what is involved in assuring there aren’t any leaks or pressure issues or whatever else that could possibly go wrong?
Hi Bill
My husband and I started out on nocturnal in August, 2006. We stayed on it for 3 weeks and went to days. Our problems were: we were brand new to the machine, I had to go back to work and needed my sleep, and we had problems with nocturnal. We are going back on nocturnal when I get out of school in June. Why? Since I work from 7:30-4:30 and then come home and do a 4 hour dialysis, I don’t have a life. If we could up the time to later, I could do some things at school or at home and wouldn’t have to rush home.
Our clinic (San Francisco- Bay Area) has trained many people for nocturnal. They use a device that is used for bed wetters that goes is on your site and is plugged in like an alarm. Our problem is my husband has a catheter and it was brand-new when we started out with this alarm. It ended up pulling down on his catheter and he ended up in a lot of pain. Our other problem is that even though he had a drip system for the heparin, he ended up clotting twice. I was getting no sleep and we ended that. We are looking forward to starting nocturnal when I don’t have to go to work each day and if I miss some sleep, I’ll just nap in the day time. We need to make a site for people who are just beginning nocturnal. I sure would like to hear from people who are successful and maybe take away some of the fear.
Barb
To all those going for nocturnal,
If you search out other threads on this site referring to nocturnal, you can pick up info on how to’s of the tx. I agree with Barb that a site, or board, devoted to nocturnal would be helpful.There are simple answers to how to run nocturnal txs. It beats me why so few home patients, or professionals who could answer questions, post to the boards. If just one expert would come on this site, technical questions could be cleared up, one, two, three.
Barb, how many patients are doing nocturnal at your unit? When you find out how to adjust the heparin for nocturnal, I’d like to know the answer for that. As I see it, the most important things to achieve to get good txs. whether short or nocturnal, in addition to the basics of setting the machine up well, needles placed/catheter ready, is getting the correct amount of heparin and avoiding machine alarms. If the machine is set up properly, that will eliminate most alarms. And there are some ways that alarms are set off with nocturnal txs that can be avoided, or lessened, with proper techniques of securing the lines etc. There are simple answers so would be nice if they could be easily located on one board.