Ass Kicked by Altitude

I started today with an early dialysis at 6:15AM in St. George, Utah. The dialysis treatment went swimmingly. My dialysis nurse was very sweet, his name was Jason, and he took very good care of me. This was a not-for-profit unit called Dixie Dialysis which offered tons of accommodations I'm not really used to, such as Jason bringing me coffee and cookies, and providing lidocaine, a numbing agent. Like most hemodialysis patients, I use licocaine in cream form, which I put on about an hour prior to the cannulation (insertion of the two needles) in order to prevent pain. It's a real asset. I have my own tubes which I apply, but Dixie Dialysis also supplies licocaine for patients in the form of a tiny shot under the skin. The only thing I didn't like was the chair, which was too big for me and left me with a sore back since I had to sit in it for more than four hours. After dialysis we went for a nice lunch at the All-American Classic Diner in Cedar City, Utah. Then we headed UP to Cedar Breaks National Monument. It was beautiful, and once again I was in awe of the sights around me, the huge rock formations and the millions of beautiful trees, including cypress, scrub pine, aspen wearing their fall colors, spruce, and many more. However, by the time we climbed to the park entrance I had started to feel the effects of the elevation on my circulation. My entire left side became wobbly and weak. No pain, just the circulation being somehow stymied by the elevation. My left side feels like it doesn't belong to me. It has happened several times on this trip and I shrugged it off as the heat or being hungry, the effects of medication, or post-dialysis fatigue. But I finally realized today that it's just the elevation that effects me. When we reached the summit of 10,420 feet, having climbed from an elevation of just a few thousand feet, I felt my worst, my weakest. At that point Gabriel made the decision to descend, which we did quickly since it's a very steep road going up and going back down. I immediately felt better with each foot of the descent that was behind us, and by the time we got to our motel at Parowan I felt 100% fine. It was pretty obvious that going up that high that fast kicked my ass, and going down made it all go away. Just a heads-up to my fellow dialysis patients that are flat-landers that they have to watch out when they visit higher elevations. I guess I won't be moving to the Rockies! I hope that people are coming away from reading this blog with a better understanding of dialysis, and I hope that dialysis patients come away with a greater desire to travel, to live, to experiment. Don't be afraid. Do it! That's the message I want people to get from this blog.