Jasmine Stalker-Firth

It is 5am. Jasmine, Neil, and I have just come back from a stroll under the stars on a crisp winter’s night. And it is the first time Jasmine hasn’t been connected to her machine on a night since she was 17 days old.

Neil and I had been up chatting late this evening, even though we knew shouldn’t have as we are always exhausted the next day. After midnight we started getting ready for bed and I changed Jasmine’s dirty nappy. When I looked at her catheter it looked slightly different. Normally there is a thin blue stripe which runs down the whole of Jasmine’s line which comes out of her tummy and is connected to the catheter which we open and close everyday. Tonight, or this morning rather, the thin blue stripe on her line had a white gap in it.

We took a picture of it and blew it up on the computer to see it better and then we shone a torch on the white gap. It was a split! We rang the ward, disconnected Jasmine from her machine, and ordered a taxi.

We got there around 1.30am and the nurses inspected the split and decided that we should wait a while longer to make sure that we got a good sample from Jasmine’s peritoneum.

At 3am they snipped the line where it was split, soaked it in bettadine (antiseptic), attached a brand new catheter and took a sample of her peritoneal fluid and sent it off to the lab. We studied the left over piece of line and the nurses said that it would have definitely split by morning and it was great that we spotted it.

At 4am, the lab results came back – Jasmine’s white cell count was six and we were cleared to go home. Fantastic. Our lovely nurses packed us up with forty-eight hours of dialysis fluid full of antibiotics and heparin and now we are back home drinking tea. Neil is sorting out the washing and I am blogging – the things we do to relax.

We are a bit tired and teary but very proud of my obsessive-compulsive dialysis. Jasmine is snoozing in her cot and we have the rest of the night off dialysis. We are officially on dialysis holiday until 4pm tomorrow and thrilled to be in our own bed tonight.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 13th, 2008 at 5:26 am and is filed under home. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.