I used to pack for trips the way most people pack for a small move.
There was a kidney dialysis machine. The bags of peritoneal solution are each about the size of a throw pillow. The tubing, the supplies, the careful accounting of what I needed for the night. The machine got its own seat in the car. Not a corner of the trunk. Not squeezed in somewhere. Its own seat, buckled in like a passenger, because that is what it was: an uninvited one, but a passenger nonetheless.
Then came Charlotte.
I flew to Charlotte, North Carolina, for work from Sunday through today. Just a regular work trip. Flights, meetings, a hotel room. It was nothing remarkable on paper. But remarkable in a way that I was mindful of throughout the airport. I didn’t have a dialysis machine to drag along this time.
No machine. No solution bags. No long checklist of medical equipment. For eighteen months, dialysis came with me everywhere I went. Travel required logistics. Logistics required planning. Planning required energy I rarely had. The type of tired that sits in your legs before you even leave the house, where a bag that should feel light does not. And even when I managed all of that, I was still tethered. Still accounting for the weight of kidney failure on every trip.
I remember exactly what those travel miles used to feel like. I had attended a wedding in October in Colorado, a few weeks before my kidney transplant. I brought the machine with me. You do what you have to do. You celebrate your people; you show up, and you figure out the logistics of peritoneal dialysis along the way, sometimes in a hotel room as if it is the most normal thing in the world. Around Christmas, I’d spent a night at my parents’ house, with gifts and the machine in tow. My parents, who have seen me through more medical chapters than any of us planned for, made space for it like they make space for everything needed. Without a word, without a fuss. And then there was the last time. The night before my kidney transplant, I checked into the hotel in Omaha. Set up the machine one last time. Ran through the routine I had run through hundreds of times before. I knew, going through each step that night, that this was it. The last setup. The last night I’d have to bring the machine somewhere other than returning it to the clinic.
Now, I pack medications. Quite a few of them. My twice-daily transplant meds, Sidney’s (the kidney) standing orders. I was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes in my late twenties, so insulin and diabetic supplies have been travel companions for a long time now. That little zippered case has been part of my packing routine for years, and it isn’t going anywhere. When medications in a bag have been your reality for that long, you don’t dread them. You pack them.
But the dialysis machine? That was added. Something that took up more space than it deserved, physically and otherwise.
Max Lucado wrote an entire book called Traveling Light, about releasing the burdens you were never intended to bear. One line from it has stayed with me: “We all lug loads we were never intended to carry.” I thought about that as I lifted one manageable bag into the overhead bin and sat down without having to account for anything else.
I sat down. I buckled my seatbelt. The plane took off. And somewhere over the heartland, something shifted.
I was traveling light.
For the first time in a long time, the only thing I was carrying while traveling was a bag.
That is what kidney dialysis does over months and years. It becomes part of the cost of being alive. You absorb it. You adapt. You move through your life with it draped over everything.
And then one day, you walk through an airport like a person who is just going somewhere.
Here is the thing I want to say: this is my new normal now. A carry-on bag. Energy enough to actually get on a plane. The ability to say ‘yes’ to a work trip without bracing for dozens of logistics.
Those old days aren’t coming back. And I’m not bitter about them. They were part of the story. A real, hard chapter I wouldn’t erase because it’s what makes this chapter feel sweeter.
Charlotte was a good trip. The home office visit went well. I was tired from travel delays, not from dialysis.
I came home with the same carry-on bag I left with. Medications intact. Sidney is doing great. No dialysis machine needed.
No extra baggage, in any sense of the word.
Related Posts:
My Experience at the Kidney Dialysis Clinic
About Kidney Dialysis
Beginnings & New Beginnings
Chad, this post is incredibly insightful. Working in a dialysis clinic, we often told patients they could still travel, comparing the portability of peritoneal dialysis to the difficulty of finding an open chair at an in-center facility. We unintentionally oversimplified that experience. Reading your account, I realize that while we presented travel as a simple logistics matter of shipping supplies, the reality you lived—the constant planning, coordination, and physical toll—was akin to traveling with a small child.
We would write letters for the patients to give to TSA agents so their emergency drugs would not be questioned. Their catheters attached to their bodies needed writing so that an inexperienced agent didn’t touch or pull at it. God forbid they would be delayed and pulled to the side for further screening for the lifegiving tether coming from their belly. A balance of keeping terror out for the agent with keeping live going for the patient.
Thank you for articulating the weight of that experience so clearly.