The Game-Changing Conversation That Transformed My Dialysis Experience: And How It Could Change Yours, Too

• Discover how one person’s diet changes helped them feel better during and after dialysis

• Learn the crucial role of communication and collaboration with your doctor in finding the right dialysis prescription

• Find out how tracking your diet and being transparent with your healthcare team can lead to a better treatment plan

Read on for the whole story.

A quick story. I was on home hemodialysis, doing short daily, and I was constantly feeling miserable, nauseous, sick, and tired. But, I had fantastic labs, and the doctor didn’t want to do anything about it. So, I said to him as he was on his way out the door, “Well, if I have such great labs, why do I feel so bad?” That stopped him dead in his tracks.

He turned around, we talked some more, and he ended up changing my prescription completely. He changed the duration of each session and the number of sessions, and he also changed the amount of potassium that was being pulled off.

This Is What Happens

If you pull off too much potassium and too much salt, you’re going to feel nauseous, which is exactly what happened to me. If you pull off too much fluid, your blood pressure tanks. And with the fluid, it also takes off potassium. So, you just plain feel horrible. Once we got that squared away, I came back to life.

Maybe you can learn from my mistakes if you follow a renal diet. The reason my doctor could and would modify my dialysis prescription is because he knew that I was following my diet. We tracked what I ate for the month between doctor visits. I showed him exactly what I was eating and how much phosphorus, potassium, and sodium I was taking in. He realized at that point that because my diet was good, the prescription was too harsh.

Pay Attention and Communicate

My experience shows the importance of tracking what you eat and talking to your doctor; you not only have to have trust in him, but he has to have trust in you. The only way you can get that trust is by talking to him honestly all the time, telling him what you’re doing, and letting him know that you’re paying attention. That’s the biggie.

Heck, I even ran into that when my son was in school. I used to go to the open houses just so the teachers knew me, that I was paying attention, and it paid off royally, which is a whole other story that I won’t go into here.

You have to let your healthcare providers know that you are paying attention. That’s my rant for today. I hope it helps some of you.

Now that you’ve finished reading this blog post, I encourage you to take the next step towards improving your renal diet and overall health by exploring The Dialysis Patient’s MAGIC Recipe Cookbook.

This book is packed with all the information you need to understand and follow a renal diet, containing over a hundred recipes that I personally used to improve my health. Plus, I’ve included a seven-day meal plan to get you started on the right track. Click on this link https://a.co/d/fpt3x2h to learn more and empower yourself to thrive on your renal diet.