Your normal weight without any extra fluid in your body is called "dry weight." Extra fluid can be dangerous and cause extra strain on your body, especially your heart and lungs. When you have kidney failure, your body depends on dialysis to get rid of the extra fluid and toxins that build up in your body.
Your dry weight is measured in kilograms and one kilogram equals 2.2 pounds. We weigh Rowan every night before dialysis and every morning after dialysis to record his dry weight. We know Rowan is at his correct dry weight when his blood pressure is within his normal range, he does not have swelling anywhere, and his breathing is comfortable and easy. If his blood pressure is low and his weight is down, it usually means the dialysis removed too much fluid from his body. If his blood pressure is high or he has swelling anywhere on his body it means dialysis left too much fluid in his body. In either case, we would need to adjust the dextrose percentage of the solution that we use during dialysis to control how much fluid is drained from his body at night. Rowan’s doctors and nurses help us to determine when we need to make changes, but after doing this on our own for so long we have become very good at determining when adjustments are needed.
Rowan’s dry weight is currently around 7.8 kg, which equals about 17 lbs. Just recently we had to adjust his dialysis fluids because his blood pressure was low a few mornings in a row and his dry weight was trending down. We’ve now gotten him back to stable numbers, but we need his weight to continue to trend up to know that he is gaining weight. Sometimes it’s hard to tell if his weight is “off” because of dialysis or because of his nutrition so it becomes trial and error until we find something that works for him! This is one of the reasons we have monthly follow up appointments with our dialysis team. In our monthly appointments, the PD nurses, nephrologists, and renal dieticians work together to adjust Rowan’s care plan.
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