People often ask me, “Isn’t it mentally challenging to do
dialysis?” My honest answer always is, “Yes, it is but
it’s so much better than not doing dialysis.” Sometimes I add
morbidly, “The only advantage of not doing dialysis is that it
doesn’t last too long…”
Everyone
grows tired of doing dialysis. In particular, those of us who
do it at home are vulnerable to souring on the routine. We might not
have the same support system as those who do in-center, where you meet
others in the same condition. We do our treatments more often and
therefore also spend more time on it. And even though most of us know
our quality of life improves from doing more and longer treatments, and
we feel much better in between our treatments, it can still be difficult
to get through.
So
here’s my trick to my “mental survival.” It’s all about attitude.
I know this is a trite old adage bordering on a platitude. So, allow
me to dive a little bit deeper. Regardless of modality, dialysis is a
condition of life. If you need it it’s like eating or sleeping. It’s
there. It doesn’t go away. Therefore, we all face a choice. We
can either embrace it or we can hate it. It’s even OK to hate
it as long as we are able to embrace it at the same time.
If you embrace it and tell yourself, this treatment is what keeps me
alive – or however you want to formulate it in your mind – doing
dialysis becomes bearable because you know it is necessary for your
survival, just like breathing and eating are necessary to stay
alive for everyone. When you have accepted it as fundamental for your
survival it allows you to do whatever you want to do with your life as
long as you consider this to be your new lifestyle, your new
circumstance, a fact of life.
If, on the other hand, you decide to hate it and see it as an
obstacle to living, it will rule you, and after a while
it will consume your very being. You will live to do dialysis and there
will be very little room for other things in your life. Hatred is a very
powerful emotion. It has the ability to blur your vision, sour your
lives and destroy everything that’s enjoyable and good in life. Once we
realize hatred to be such a powerful destroyer of life, it
should be easy to see that hating something you cannot live without very
easily becomes all-consuming and we can become our own worst
enemies.
You end up in a trap where you can’t live with dialysis, and you
can’t live without it.
These
thoughts didn’t come easily to me. I didn’t like doing dialysis (I still
don’t particularly like it) but I learned to live with it.
One thing that really helped me was reading my fellow
countryman, the philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard. Now, I will not
recommend reading Kierkegaard to anyone. His writing is extremely dense
– even when reading it in Danish, his and my native tongue. But this is
what I learned from him that I now use in many aspects of life beside
dialysis.
Freedom is a synthesis of necessity and possibility.
It sounds weird but hang on.
We must all learn to face the necessities of life. Many of these
necessities—like dialysis—lead to a state of despair. But we can’t
ignore despair, because that will lead to hatred. We need to
face and embrace the necessities of life to deal with the
despair.
And when we embrace the necessities, we are able to
see the possibilities that life
gives us under the conditions we were given. This in turn makes us
free to do whatever we desire, because we have embraced
the necessities of life, like food and breathing—and for some of us,
dialysis.
Sometimes, when people still insist on how they hate dialysis so much
they just feel like quitting, I say to them, “I have always wanted
to fly like a bird.” And then I pause and just look them in the
eyes. It usually works. They understand and see the futility in their
desire. For me flying would be the ultimate symbol of freedom. But since
that cannot be fulfilled, I have to find freedom in the
possibilities that are granted to me through the necessities of
my current condition.
This is what makes me stay motivated to continue my treatment. Some
days I hate it and that’s OK because I know I will also never be able to
fly unless I crawl into an airplane or maybe a hot air ballon.
Now, wouldn’t that be cool?
- The Renal Warrior Project. Join Now
- Source: https://homedialysis.org/news-and-research/blog/591-how-i-stay-motivated-to-do-home-hemo