Fear and kidney failure. In wartime.
I’m on dialysis. During a war. It’s making me afraid.
Luckily, I don’t have to leave my home to do my type of dialysis. And I can even move around my apartment while I’m doing it. But what I can’t do is leave the apartment to go to our building’s basement bomb shelter three flights down.
So every time I begin to think it’s time for me to do another treatment — they are three times a day for about 45 minutes each — I start to get afraid. I start trying to calculate the odds that a rocket attack will come while I’m tethered up. And I’ve never really been a gambling man, so it really takes an emotional toll on me to go through this process of wondering what will happen when. Of experiencing fear.
I think it might be leaking out into the rest of my life. I’m just getting very afraid to do anything, especially to leave the apartment for any reason during this “Iran 2”, even just to take the garbage outside, not to mention doing something like taking a half hour walk to my neighborhood health clinic like I’m supposed to now and again. So far, I’ve just been canceling appointments.
That’s what war is. It’s not the same for everybody. Your personal circumstances, your personal mental makeup, your experience of past traumas, all impact how much your ability to function is compromised.
It could be worse for me for sure. Ever since that terrible October 7, I’ve been worried that I might not be able to get my dialysis supplies. The two-liter bags of fluid I use for my type of treatments — peritoneal, or belly, dialysis — come from Europe, and there’s always a chance that shipping from there will be interrupted. I live with this fear (on top of the fear everyone here in Israel is carrying right now of getting killed or hurt in a rocket attack).
I hope that we all will be able to get the things we most need during this challenging time, that we will be able to live without fear; and that one day soon this will come to an end and we will have something like peace. And eventually a true peace, a peace for everyone. May it come speedily and soon.
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If you want to know more about peritoneal dialysis, you can read my blog post Dialysis amid the rockets (a new approach to kidney failure). (Or you can find my book available for free as PDF downloads, chapter-by-chapter at academia.edu.)