I have been having recurrent diarrhea for the past month or so. I am on my third antibiotic course. Everything seems to be ok for a few days and then it starts again. The day before yesterday, the gastroenterologist suggested that we do an endoscopy and a biopsy of the duodenum.

This sounded scary. Biopsy of the duodenum? Whatever did that entail?!

I have become an endoscopy veteran by now and have had more than I care to count. In fact, I stumbled upon this post where I actually compare how endoscopies have changed over the years! Just imagine! So, I wasn't in the least worried about the endoscopy. It was the other beast I was worried about. How can something called 'biopsy of the duodenum' be anything pleasant?!

Anyway, these days I have stopped thinking about all this, stopped applying my mind to my treatment and surrendered completely to the doctors. Its become a pointless exercise. So much of it is just trial and error!

So, I went ahead and got the endoscopy and the duodenum biopsy done. I was advised to do a heparin-free dialysis that night. A biopsy involved cutting off a tiny little piece of the tissue in the duodenum and examining it under the microscope. So, there was a small chance of bleeding. Heparin is the drug that is used for almost all dialysis patients to prevent the blood from clotting when it is outside the body getting purified in the artificial kidney. So, if you used heparin after a biopsy (and even a surgery), chances are that the site of injury will start bleeding.

It is normally fairly straightforward to do a heparin-free dialysis in-centre during the day. All that is needed is to flush the lines with saline every 30 minutes. At night, it can be quite a bother. Giving a saline flush every 30 minutes means someone needs to stay up the whole night. Guru, the tech who dialyzes me was, as usual, very co-operative. He stayed up the whole night and religiously flushed my bloodlines with saline every 30 minutes.

All in all, everything went off well. The biopsy report is expected in 4-5 days. Let us hope we get some clue on what the issue is.