Great visit

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The wife is on peritoneal dialysis - PD - and has been mostly for about a year. I say mostly because they removed the PD port in March and put it back in at the end of May. Then it gets complicated. Just say that since mid-June she's been back on PD. This means that she gets dialysis very night instead of 3 times a week, better for her system and less hard on her body all around. However, because of the port, she basically has an open wound into her peritoneum all the time. Her port entrance, even when healed, is still actually open, so it has to be cleaned daily and re-bandaged. Also, because there is fluid going into her her peritoneum every night, there has to be a sterile hook up to the machine and fluids. We get the fluids delivered in boxes that have the sterile bags inside bags in them. An hour or so before we hook her up, I will open up and put the bags in place, one goes on the machine to be warmed, don't want putting cold fluids inside you. However, because the obvious dangers, we have had to keep the house cleaner than we used to. We also have to have an annual home inspection by the PD nurse. That was today. It was supposed to be last Tuesday, but something came up. And we passed. She thought we were doing a good job. She also liked our "hacks" that made things easier. For example, we use a commercial style mop bucket, that I took some of the stuff out of and we taped up the squeezing part out of the way and put a longer handle on for our drain bag. I also use it to transport the bags from the storage room to the machine every day. Another thing we did was figure out a way to keep the drain bag from falling in the commode while it is draining. We took one of the boxes that we get the fluid in, cut a hole in it and stick the drain tube through the hole, then open it to drain. This is an idea that she now suggests to other patients. So, all our hard work to get the house extra clean worked out. Oh, and we told her that we were babysitting Opal so she didn't realize we had adopted a couple of new cats. Onyx didn't come out and we could've passed her off as an old cat we've had, but Opal is still so small that we couldn't do that. She was happy to hear we were below what she thought we had - she thought we had 20, we told her 17 - but chances are good that next year we will be down to 17 or even lower... hopefully we won't lose another 5 next year! All in all, a good visit.