Throughout your dialysis experience, there will be things that will work for one person that might not work for you or will work for you but not for another person.  Here are some ideas we have or are using during treatment that helped along our journey.

How to set up your home treatment space

Your nurse and a technician will visit you at home to help you decide where to set up your treatment area and how to store your supplies.

Your treatment space will need to be equipped with the following:

  1. A comfortable chair or bed to use during your treatment
  2. The right kind of electrical outlet, which will be set up for you by your tech team—which is part of your extended care team
  3. Good lighting
  4. A water source
  5. A telephone nearby so you can make a call during treatment if you need to
  6. Space for your supplies and machine
  7. A bathroom drain or other plumbing to drain treatment fluids

Carts:

Carts are a huge must for your home treatment setup. Your cart will depend on a few things:

  1. The space you have by your chair
  2. The height that you need your machine to be from your chair

Additional Accessories:

There are several items that I would not run without!

  1. A heating blanket is preferred at least a twin as it needs to cover and wrap around your feet. They tend to get the coldest when I run.
  2. A storage container next to the chair with extra supplies can be great when needed. It also can be where you hold your setup supplies on top and hook tape to the side before treatment for easy access.
  3. A battery backup is needed to help keep your machine running when the power flickers, stops, or any other issues with your power. The battery backup will maintain your treatment until your generator or additional power source can be up and running.

I use a tote beside me when running dialysis that has the supplies I need during treatment plus additional supplies that I might need that are easy to access.

Backup Power:

Because we  (HHD patient's) are listed as being on "Life Saving Devices" our electric companies are to make sure that we maintain power. This does not always happen. To prepare yourself with a generator would be my recommendation. We currently live on a farm and need to support access to water for the animals if our power goes out. We contacted our power company and have a system that automatically starts up when our power goes out. When I say automatically I mean it still takes 1-2 minutes for everything to kick on fully. So a backup battery pack has saved my treatment many times.

Discover a Better Dialysis Experience at Home

Through our 6 years (started June 6, 2018) of HHD experience there are a lot of lessons that we have learned to be able to live on dialysis. By doing HHD we can still be active with our family, go on vacations, and see the countryside.