During a week-long training session, Kai and his mother learned to run the dialysis machine overnight.

Transcript

It started about early 2005 when he did his dialysis, and so he was home and he did it at night for about 8 hours, but with that it meant all the supplies that he would have at the hospital were coming to us now. So about 6-8 weeks, there would be about 60-70 boxes of medical supplies and at the time we were living in a 2-storey house. The closets weren’t that big, so we could only fit as much as we could. So a box of solution, of dialysis solution, was about 5-10 lbs each, and he would use about 4-5 boxes of that. So 4-5 boxes were brought up from downstairs every single day and he wasn’t at the point where he was forgetting so I didn’t really need to help him out with different cords hook up to this and buttons and things like that. But both my mom and I were trained for a week, basic training on how to hook him up just in case it came to the point where we needed to help him. More or less, my job was just carting up all of the medical supplies and I would keep an eye on him for his medication just in case, making sure he didn’t double dose which sometimes he would do—not knowingly—and just keeping him motivated, and doing that very subtly because, just trying to imagine what life’s like in his shoes—he’s forced to medically retire, he has nothing really to do around the house when we’re not there— so just trying to like, “You can,” he still had the ability to drive,  “you can go and do that,” and never really telling him “this” is what he needs to do, because I didn’t want to be judgemental, that I still have the opportunity to do things while you don’t.

---

Go back