Bruite and Thrill

I arrived at my sister's house the other night to join two of my sister's (Tricia & Kathy) for dinner before Kathy makes the great escape to Florida next week along with every other member of our family except Tricia and myself. I hadn't seen Tricia's kids in quite some time and as the goofball uncle I decided to play a little trick on them. When I arrived I went into the room they were all sitting in and told them I learned a new trick. I grabbed the chord to the lamp and told them all I could pull electricity out of the chord. I put my fistulated (ya I just coined that word) wrist out for them to touch and had each of them rest their hand directly on the area of the fistula. The reactions weren't as great as I had hoped although the girls did giggle a bit. I guess they're a little immune to my silliness after all of these years or perhaps as they're all growing up.

So what is it that is happening at the point on my wrist where the fistula has been added? Well I'm no expert and in an earlier post I suggested that a piece of vein was added in that area but I have done a tad bit of research and I have a bit more of an understanding of what is going.

So I believe fistulas occur naturally within our body, particularly in diseased areas and an abnormal passage forms between two organs or parts of the body. I'm guessing that doctors, upon discovering fistulas, realized they could create their own and that they could be useful... as an example in the case of dialysis.

What they do is they split a vein in the arm and then attach it to a deeper artery. What happens naturally as this heals is that the vein takes on characteristics of the artery and becomes a sort of super vein. As we all recall from 7th grade science class (ya right) an artery carries blood from the heart out to various parts of the body and veins carry the blood back to the heart. When the vein is tied to that artery the turbulence created by the opposite direction of flow (or so I believe) is causing a vibration that almost feels electric. This is called in medical terms the thrill.

When I sleep at night my arm often finds its way onto my pillow and typically I have an ear on that same pillow. Whenever this happens I hear the pumping of my blood through my body by way of the fistula. When I visit the doctor who performed the procedure that created the fistula he always listens with a stethoscope. The sound he is listening to is similar to what I hear through my pillow. The medical term for this is called a bruite (pronounced broo-ee... it must be french).

After visiting with Tricia's kids I made my way to the kitchen to see Tricia and Kathy. They both felt it too. I won't tell you about the conversation that followed but I will tell you that Kathy mentioned if she got a fistula she would ask them to amp it up a bit. Think about it.

My name is Bil... and I have kidney disease.