| What's good about home HD |
What's bad about home HD |
| You are in charge of your own day-to-day care, with your team as consultants to help you feel your best. |
You have to be responsible enough to do all the treatments each week. |
| Treatments are done by you and a partner, after a training course. A nurse is always on call to help you. |
If a rare emergency does happen, you will have to keep your cool and deal with it. |
| You have time to do quiet tasks or sleep—in your own home—and you get to decide the rules about eating and visitors yourself. |
You don't get to meet and spend time with other patients (but you have more time to spend with your family and friends). |
| You can do treatments on your own schedule, which can make keeping a job, finding childcare, or other tasks much more possible. |
A partner must be there, unless your program doesn't require it. Some centers may use a "Life Alert" button, or monitor treatments over the internet. |
| You don't have to spend time driving to and from the clinic for each treatment. |
You do have to set up the machine, clean it after treatments, and order supplies. |
| You or your care partner must learn to put in your needles, which can help your access last much longer. (It's best if you do this.) |
It can be scary to learn to put needles in (but it hurts much less when you do it yourself). |
| You can get a lot more treatment than most centers are able to give you, which can help prevent long-term problems, so you stay healthier. |
With equipment in your home and treatments done longer or more often, it is hard to forget about dialysis. You need space to store the machine and boxes of supplies. |
| You can have a much more normal diet, drink more fluids, and take fewer medicines (including phosphate binders). |
You need to invest the time in training and in doing the treatments yourself to get these benefits. |
