Fistula redo

Last Thursday we had a hard time with Bryce's pressure coming from his site during treatment. The machine beeped pretty much non stop for two hours so we had to end dialysis early. We thought maybe the site in his arm was being temperamental- sometimes it just freaks out for no reason. Usually we are able to get it fixed and continue with treatment but no luck his time. Friday night we went to dialyze and as part of our pre-treatment checklist we have to see if his fistula is getting good blood flow. We can listen to it with a stethoscope and feel the strong pulse with our hand. We checked and didn't find either. Bryce called our Home Hemo Nurse who told us that could mean a blood clot in his fistula, so she would schedule an emergency fistula-gram for Saturday morning.

Saturday at 11 Bryce went in for his fistula-gram in the radiology dept. They planned to go in with a sonogram machine and map his veins, see if there was a clot and if they could clear it out. They found three clots up in his fistula veins and spent three hours ballooning his veins to try and clear the clots and get the lines to open back up. No luck. Last resort they put in a chest catheter (CVC) like he had when we first started for us to dialyze with in the mean time. 

We've done three treatments with the CVC and it's annoying- with a higher risk of infection (since it's basically an open wound) we have more precautions and steps to take when we dialyze. It is less comfortable for Bryce and sets off the machine alarms a lot, which wakes us up all night and makes the treatment longer. 

He had an appointment with the vascular surgeon today to see if the fistula could be saved or if we would need a whole new one. He gave us two options: 1.) Do a surgery on the right arm (his current fistula is in his left) and add a whole new fistula there. 2.) Do a surgery on his left arm and add a graft in the current fistula deeper in the arm to make it work. The doc recommended the first option, so surgery is scheduled for next Friday May 6th. The new fistula takes about 6-8 weeks to heal, mature and be strong enough to use so we will have to dialyze using the CVC in the meantime. The first time he got sepsis was from his CVC so that's obviously a concern at this point for us. Not sure if we will be able to go back to evening treatments so we can get better sleep at night or if because we get better cleaning and dialysis we will just have to suffer thru and do it at night.

This is just one more thing that makes us even more anxious for a transplant and hoping for a call any day that they've found a match!