Delivery Day — 60 Boxes of Keeping Me Alive?!

Once a month, a truck pulls up and unloads about 60 boxes of dialysis solution onto my doorstep.

Each box is heavy. Each box is keeping me alive.

The first time this happened I didn't know how to feel. Standing there watching box after box come off that truck it hits you differently when the reality of your life shows up stacked on a pallet. This is what kidney failure looks like from the outside. Sixty boxes of fluid that your kidneys can no longer make on their own.

Now? It's just delivery day.

I store everything in a cool shaded area of the house temperature controlled, out of direct sunlight. That part matters more than people realize. The solution has to stay within a certain temperature range or it's compromised. So you learn. You adapt. You make space in your home for the thing keeping you alive.

Seven nights a week I connect to my machine. Nine to ten hours. And every month those 60 boxes make that possible.

People ask me how I deal with it mentally. Honestly you just get used to it. Not in a numb way. In a this is my life and I'm still here kind of way. The truck comes. The boxes stack up. And I keep going.

That's what dialysis patients do.

If you're newly diagnosed or just started dialysis and you're reading this it gets more familiar. Not easier necessarily. But familiar. And familiar is manageable.

We keep going.