This is weird. I must have been half asleep when I got up this morning. The first thing I did was not close the clamp before disconnecting my line. That should have been the first clue. Then, instead of realizing it was the wrong line to begin with, I hooked the blue line up to the blue for rinse back instead of hooking the red line up to the red. I didn’t even notice the saline bag filling up with red blood instead of emptying. Still half asleep, I tried a manual rinseback that didn’t work either. I just couldn’t seem to clear my head and thinking. Nothing made sense. My end weight was a Kg below what it should have been and BP in the 60’s and 50’s. I still had my needles in and called my nurse who told me to hang a new saline bag and give myself up to 1 liter of saline. It took a while before what she was telling me made sense. The saline was in the garage and very cold!
Never done that before. It was as difficult to push the saline through as it is to do a manual rinseback. I gave myself 700-800 cc’s saline and called it good. Ended up .2 Kg below dry weight but bp low-normal. I lost probably a liter of blood plus diluted what I had with 700-800cc’s saline. Needless to say, I feel a little strange. :o(
Kind of scary to realize my brain could just stop thinking clearly. I did take another dose of Tylenol pm at about 4am because I woke up and couldn’t go back to sleep. I probably won’t do that again. I guess I learned something new and gained a sobering realization that something so routine could go wrong!
That is scary, Wendy! I’m glad you came through it okay, although the cold saline and loss of blood do not sound pleasant! Have you checked into other ways to fall back asleep that don’t involve taking Benadryl (in the Tylenol PM)? I don’t know if this would help you stay asleep, but I find that my sleep is much deeper if I wear foam earplugs and an eye mask to sleep. It’s still easy to hear anything important even with the earplugs, but things like the furnace kicking in aren’t as jarring.
Thanks Dori. I think part of waking up is that I am still adjusting to dialyzing while I sleep on top of the fact that I am a light sleeper to begin with. It has gotten much better over the past couple of months. Just one of those nights I guess. I will be curious to see what my Hct and iron counts will be for my labs this week.
Just goes to show me that something so routine can suddenly become complicated.
So, how has it gone since then? How are you doing?
I feel ok now. Wednesday I felt a bit off - short of breath etc. I dialyzed Wednesday night because I wanted to do labs. I didn’t take any fluid off though. When I dialyzed last night I noticed my venous and effluent pressures were very low, in the 60’s when I was laying down. I wonder if the reason was that my blood is so diluted! I am very curious about my lab results which I should get today.
thanks for asking!!
I’m glad you’re feeling better today. Losing a fair amount of blood could make you short of breath, but if you don’t feel that way, it probably wasn’t due to anemia. I hope things continue to go better for you. 
Hi Wendy,my name is Alan,i do home haemodialysis,have had same experience as you being half awake & clamping the wrong clamp,i even did dialysis with blood lines hooked up on opposite sites,the whole 4hrs,that felt strange.One has to be totally on the ball when it comes to dialysis,ever forgot to clamp saline?I have & ended up overweight after dialysis,i didnt notice until i was stripping the machine,the saline bag was empty!Had to get another saline bag to do reinfusion.Hope to chat sometime,regards,Alan
