Not only did he build a machine but hopefully, he also built some kind of shunt that allows him to hookup to the machine easily.
If he just uses IVs to connect to his arteries and veins, then it must hurt like hell. Veins are easy to get to, arteries, different story.
When I was in the hospital, my roommate’s doctor need blood gas or something from his arteries and I remember seeing the cut down kit, it did not look fun although they at least gave him pain killers and a local dose of Novacane. I asked my Doctor why they couldn’t just use a long needle? Since I was just a kid he blew me off. I wonder if they still do that.
Back to the Chinese guy, that is incredible. I wonder what he uses to filter the waste products from the good stuff?
It's hard to predict the progression of chronic renal failure, but nephrologists try to prepare patients for dialysis months in advance. One of the things they do is create a fistula between an artery and vein in the arm, where the blood is flowing directly from the artery to the vein. It takes a while for it to 'mature' to where it can be used for dialysis - the vein has to grow to handle that amount of blood flow.
They can stenose and have to be either opened up if possible or reattached progressively higher up the arm. And if they have nowhere else to go, they'll put in a graft or shunt from that artery back into the large brachiocephalic veins inside the thorax. Often these patients had renal failure due to vascular disease (#1 diabetes, #2 hypertension), so their vessels are at risk to begin with.
This Chinese man probably has a fistula that survived all these years and doesn't have that much difficulty hitting it.
Peritoneal dialysis is normally done at home. For that, the patient has a port put in their side, and they put several liters of dialysate fluid into their abdomen. It reaches equilibrium with the body fluids and is drawn off several hours later. It's done daily and the patient can walk around and do other things with it in, but they have to be careful to keep the port sterile (no open doors or windows to prevent blowing air particles, etc.) because getting an infection in their abdomen can easily end their ability to do dialysis this way. It's more easily tolerated because doing dialysis daily means smaller swings in the waste products in the body. A lot of the fatigue from dialysis isn't the total amount of waste product they have, but the big swings in the levels means the body is changing how it compensates in a short period of time.