Water Retention or Weight Gain? Blood Pressure Crashes (Dialysis)

Water Retention or Weight Gain? Blood Pressure Crashes (Dialysis)

 

    As I mentioned before, I also had a hard time controlling my fluid intake. The more fluid you have on you, the more fluid that must be taken off. To get the measurement of what needed to be taken off, they would weigh you me every time I came in. The trouble with this method is there's no way to know how much weight I gained was from fluids, and how much was from actual weight gain. As I said before, I wasn’t eating much before I started dialysis. As I began to feel well again with dialysis filtering out toxins, I had an appetite. I also had more energy and felt better because they gave me iron through my dialysis treatment. It really is helpful for the patient to keep an exact record of the fluids they drink and to guesstimate approximately how much fluid they might have taken in from foods. I had trouble doing this. So, I would be weighed, they’d see how much my weight differed from the previous session and they would ask me if I thought so many kilos seemed appropriate. When too much fluid was taken off, my blood pressure crash as I mentioned. When this would happen I would feel suddenly, extremely hot; I would start to see stars, and I would start gasping for air. When these symptoms would present, I would have to immediately yell for my technician to come over and he or she would recline my chair as much as possible, give me some oxygen, and begin squeezing a bag of fluids that would return saline back into my body until I began to feel better. This was a defeating process as it often meant, quite a bit of fluid was returned. The whole point of dialysis, besides removing toxins, is to remove excess fluid. When I would go home with extra fluid on my body, it meant I should be drinking even less than what I usually was allowed to drink. In hindsight, I’m sure I very often had too much fluid taken off of me, which in turn led me to feeling so thirsty and having regular blood pressure crashes during treatment. Because dialysis pulls fluids and electrolytes out, I would frequently wake up in the middle of the night with intensely, painful Charley horses.