I can clearly remember about 15 years ago when the head nurse first cannulated my arterio-venous "vein" for dialysis because the blood just seeped through under the skin because the vein wasn't mature enough to be cannulated. So my arm where they pricked me just bulged and it was painful.
They retracted the big but sharp needle and the bleeding was abated after some pressure on it was applied and it was again pricked after a week so that it can be used as I cannot really maintain a catheter on my neck where they first use to draw blood for cleaning and I just wished that a catheter doesn't get infected because it is a painless way to get ddialyzed but it is prone o infection.
So a dialysis patient have to be created with what we call an arterio-venous fistula where the artery on the arm is connected or grated to the superficial vein and upon doing so the vein would act like an artery which now will give and receive large amounts of blood for the dialysis machine to clean out with its waste products.
As with the large amounts of blood that will have to be cleaned, it means a relatively large needle to be inserted to the arterio-venous fistula on the patient's arm. One will ask if its painful to be cannulated or pricked by the needle. It depends on who does the cannulation but generally it is tolerable especially if the fistula like mine is old and have a lot of scars already with many spots of desensitized skin that sometimes doesn't feel pain anymore.
So since have some smartphone that I can use to immortalize one moment in time where I will be cannulated for dialysis, it will be I think a good idea to do that just for education of steemians who want to know about how a dialysis patient is being prepared for dialysis two to three time weekly in their hemodialysis.
