Dialysis Machine

A surprisingly tiring day today! The Wonderspouse and I had a lie-in until about 10.00, which was lovely, then, after a short morning I spent the afternoon at the hospital with Scharwenka before doing a grocery shop and coming home again.

I'm glad to say that (fingers crossed, touch wood, etc etc etc) Scharwenka seems to be improving and was in good spirits. He'd spent the night hooked up to this dialysis machine, since his own kidneys were not removing the impurities fast enough they decided to give them a bit of help.

He's still having his blood levels of all sorts of thing very carefully monitored - and has so many holes in him and bruises now that he's looking like a pincushion. They discovered shortly before I left that he's low on magnesium, so had just hooked him up to a magnesium drip for a few hours! He's also covered with electrodes and had several ECGs done while I was there.

He's also making himself useful - one junior doctor was a bit unsteady on the concept of moles and the Avogadro number etc etc, so Scharwenka gave him a tutorial from his hospital bed. He's also now entered that stage in his recovery where he won't give them more blood until he gets the results from the last lot of tests - he likes to know what's going on!

Next stage will be to reintroduce some of the most important medications that he was on before and see what happens. It's now a matter of balancing his medical needs as well as possible.

Keeping all fingers crossed. It was, of course, wonderful to see him again.