Most informed dialysis patients know the mortality rate among said patients is 20-25% annually in the US. Those aren’t very good odds but they’re certainly better than the alternative.
Last week, a metro Chicago woman died while on dialysis after bleeding out and going into cardiopulmonary arrest. Apparently she was a home hemodialysis patient and pulled a needle out while changing clothes.
Bleeding out has to be one of the most common fears among dialysis patients. That and getting an air embolism during treatment. It’s why I can rarely sleep during treatments—after more than nine years on dialysis, I’m only now able to nod off occasionally. Each time I awaken startled. This is why it only took me about five minutes to consider nocturnal dialysis and reject the idea out of hand. What if I fall asleep, roll over and pull the venous needle out. Just how long would it take me to bleed out?
Last Friday, the patient next to me at my dialysis center nearly bled out. I say nearly because she was conscious when the paramedics wheeled her out and hopefully she got transfused and recovered. It was a horrible event. She coded—her heart stopped and she stopped breathing—but miraculously regained consciousness a short while later. It was unnerving being a few feet away and absolutely unable to help in any way. Three days later I can’t get the look on her face as the paramedics wheeled her out to the ambulance out of my mind.
This isn’t the first time something like this has happened during my dialysis run. But when this has happened in the past, blood has spurted everywhere: on the ceiling, all over the walls, everywhere. This time the blood merely pooled under the patient’s chair.
One has to wonder, if the top criteria for determining and administering healthcare were the best possible patient outcomes rather than corporate profits, if things would be different.
Update: Wednesday, 09 September 2009 07:23AM CDT: The dialysis patient in question survived and had an uneventful dialysis treatment on Monday. The event, my proximity to it, and the processes surrounding it are still extremely disturbing.
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