On Tuesday, I did my first PET (Peritoneal Equilibration Test) with my dialysis clinic. The purpose of the test is to determine how well the dialysis is working and to see if your routine needs to change. Perhaps you need to keep solution in for longer or shorter periods? Who knows. I took two days off from work (Monday and Tuesday) to prepare and to spend time at the clinic.

The Monday was spent at home. I had to collect my urine from Monday morning till Tuesday morning. I didn’t really want to do this at work. Carrying around a 5lt bottle with urine isn’t great in an open plan office environment. LOL. Also, urinating into a 5lt bottle as a female is not an easy task.. I also had to collect my dialysis fluid for the day. I do three exchanges a day and I was not planning on keeping three bags of fluid at my desk. So staying at home was definitely a good idea.

On the Tuesday, I woke up at 8am and did my normal dialysis (and collected the fluid). I then went to the hospital at 10am where they twisted open my catheter and collected a little bit of the fluid that I had put in at 8am. I went back home and went back to the clinic (my clinic is 5 minutes away from my house) at 12PM where they drained my fluid and watched how I did my peritoneal dialysis.

By the time I was done, I was shaking and shivering. Sometime PD makes me feel quite awful afterwards. Usually I am fine but on that particular day, I was freezing. They made a lovely cup of tea while we waited for a nurse to come and take my blood. Unfortunately the nurse was a bit nervous and the blood taking process took longer than expected. I think this made me panic a little bit because my blood pressure went up quite a bit at this point.

And there you have it! That is what is done when you do your PET. It is quite a simple process. My results came back a week later and everything looked good. I will be going over to the cycler soon. They did find that my iron was quite low and I am now having to go for iron drips every month.

And this is how I spent the day after my birthday. Read all about my birthday here.