Dialysis Daily Body Weight and Urine Chart (Note)

Thursday 2014-02-06

Weight is not a constant number instead it fluctuates between morning and night and from day to day.

Even when I was very sick I managed to keep my weight at a decent level. But my urine is totally another story. Two years before my health deteriorated to the worst point I was always very thirsty and had to drink much water both day and night. Passing urine was never an issue. In fact the problem was I always passed more than I drunk. At the worst point I would drink easily more than 2 litres a day and pass out more than 2-3 litres of fluid. As a result I never suspected that I had kidney trouble until the doctor told me. How naive I was and still am. I went to the hospital because of my heart. My palpitation was so severe that I could not even close my eyes to sleep.

When I was young and healthy, I rarely got thirsty, drunk very little water and hated soupy stuff. I never formed the habit of habitual drinking, only drunk when I felt thirsty. Since I started dialysis gradually I begun to drink less, after 2 months of treatment my drinking habit returned, I no longer feel as thirsty as when I was previously. Once again now, I only drink when I feel thirsty, about 1 litre a day and seldom need to drink at night.

My urine habit is that I pass about 5-6 times per day and between 4-6 hours at the quantity of 200-300ml each time during the day and 300-500ml each time during the night, and each night is about 600-800ml in total. My weight fluctuates with my intake and passing out, but not exactly equals to it, especially in the morning. My morning weight rarely stays the same as the night weight minus passed urine, and most times I lost count of about 200-400g of my weight from the previous evening. I don't sweat at night.

The difference between morning weight and evening weight could be as little as no change to 1.7kg and averages to 0.7-0.9kg. Dialysis day the difference is the closest about 0.4kg, the next day the biggest about 1kg, and the day farther from dialysis the difference reverses back to between the two extremes. It seems nature has a stronger pull, without the interference of the artificial kidney the body tend to get back to its own rhythm.

There is a reason for the varied weight difference between dialysis day and non dialysis day. Immediately after 3 hours of dialysis I would give a pee about 300-500ml, however, in the normal course of a day, for that duration I would just pass about 100-200ml. And one other thing is that the machine moves the blood in a faster speed than its natural pace and the prime given in the blood in the beginning of the session makes the natural kidney work harder than normal hence more urine in a shorter amount of time. Besides plus the wash back I get which means on dialysis day I would take on 500ml of extra fluid with me. (One curious thing, 4-5 hours after I get home on dialysis day I always pass about 220ml of urine, and the wash back is about 220ml ) As a result I always pass more urine on dialysis day than non dialysis day.  For a patient like me who still passes urine means that the dialyser is not a total replacement of the kidney, rather it is an addition to it.

From my weight and urine chart I can see that my weight may come down a bit after dialysis which lasts till the next morning, but without dialysis the weight always reverse to its own course. Then again I dare not stay away from dialysis for too long, the longest being five days, my weight in fact dropped from 47.8kg to 46.9kg (happened in Oct last year, the data is not included in the current chart). As a result, I can’t say exactly how my weight would react if I am not dialysing.

Since a person's weight fluctuates during each day and from day to day, unless a patient can dialyse in the same time of the day all the time, if whose fluid taking on dialysis depends on whose dry weight, the dry weight could easily be messed up.