Choosing In-Home Kidney Dialysis Sharon's Story

Sharon: When you do kidney dialysis in-center, it can take at least four hours, well even maybe 4 ½ hours because you have a prep time. When you come in, you have to weigh and then have your blood pressure taken, you have a prep time. And then your hooked up to the machine and that needs to run for at least 3 ½ hours.

Then, the take off time, the post, you have to be reweighed and your blood pressures and those types of things. So, that can take at least 4 or 4 ½ hours. When you do it at home, however, it doesn’t take that long. You sit actually for about two hours and 10 minutes. That’s the time that it takes to remove the blood and return the blood.

The prep time is just setting up the machine and during the machine, the preliminary running then you have time to take your blood pressure and weigh yourself and do those preps. So, total time is probably about three hours, maybe less.

To give you an idea of the time difference that you experience between in-center and home dialysis is that you have more liberty when you’re at home. You can do it at the hour that it’s most convenient for you. I happen to do it three days on, one day off, three days, one day off. It works well for me. We have a small business. We’re able to do that.

I’m able to run at 3:00 in the morning if I’m able to. If I want to I can. If I have something important going on, I can run four days and take a day-off, whichever I want to do. It’s just more convenient. When you’re in center, you’re there, you must be there at the time you’re scheduled to be there and you just frankly don’t feel as well when you come off of it. And this one is so much better, so much easier to handle.