Navy fistula armband

Recipient: Bro
Designer: Moi (if you can call it a design)
Pattern: It's a tube in 1x1 rib
Due: ASAP
Colours: Navy
Yarn: Laceweight crochet cotton
WIP status: To rip back and re-cast on with fewer stitches

2008-Jul-6

Attempt #3 was handed off to my brother, and guess what? It wasn't too big!

It was, however, too small. (Like you couldn't see that coming.)

I was all set to give it a fourth try, but then my brother called me and said that he'd found an alternative that he really liked. There's apparently a basketball star named Allen Iverson who wears some kind of armwarming sleeve on his right arm when he plays. (Rumour has it that this is to cover up obscene tattoos, but opinion seems to be divided on that.) These sleeves are available from sporting goods stores - they're obviously able to breathe, aren't too tight, and look pretty fashionable. My brother loves his. It cost about $30, but he's very happy with it. So I have officially given up on this project.

2008-Jun-20

So I ripped it back and cast on again. This time with only 36 stitches. I can't believe it'll go on his arm, but hey, desperate times, right? I increased two stitches every four rows until I hit 46 stitches, and then kept going without shaping until the thing was long enough. Version #3 is now complete. I haven't handed it off to my brother yet, though, so I don't know if it's the right size. Probably when my mom delivers the cupcakes for DD1's upcoming birthday party, I'll give it to her to hand off to him, and then I'll wait on tenterhooks (again) for the verdict.

2008-Jun-3

After reading the story of my brother's renal health, Emma asked after his transplant status. To be honest, I'm not actually sure whether he's on the transplant list right now. Some years ago, it was determined that my father was an organ match for him (which is an AMAZING thing, since my brother is adopted), and my father gave him one of his kidneys. Unfortunately, about two and a half years later, my brother went into rejection and by the time he got himself into a hospital to see what was going on, it was too late and the kidney was kaput. He's been on dialysis (again) ever since. But he didn't like what the anti-rejection drugs did to him, such as deterioration of bone density (there was a period where he had to walk around with a cane). So I'm not sure exactly what he wants right now, transplant-wise, or whether he's even on the list.

But back to the subject of the armband to cover the fistula...I finally ripped back the first attempt and cast on again with 30 fewer stitches. It seemed ridiculously small to me, girth-wise, but I knit it up anyway and brought it over.

This week he called me with the verdict. He still loves it, but IT'S STILL TOO BIG. Can you believe it?!? So he's going to safety pin it even more tightly and get it back to me so I can see how much smaller to make it. What a pisser, eh? I would certainly agree with Carrie K that the armband thing is neat...except that I CAN'T SEEM TO FINISH IT!!! I feel like freakin' Al Pacino...just when I think I'm out, it pulls me back in...

2008-May-24

My brother called me up at work about a week and a half ago and told me that I needed to knit him something. My hackles were immediately raised, and I figured I would let him tell me all about this 'request', and then at the end tell him where he could shove it. :)

However, once I understood what he wanted, there was no way in hell I could say no.

Background: my brother has zero kidney function. He was born with only one kidney, and the one he did have lost function as he got older. Unfortunately, due to rampaging incompetence on the part of his pediatrician, this wasn't detected until my brother was about fourteen, at which point it was impossible to prevent further deterioration. (This was when the raging incompetent died and my brother's file got transferred to another doctor in the practice. You can imagine our impotent fury.)

So my brother has been on kidney dialysis for years. (You know that scene in Star Trek IV where they go back in time to the 80s, and Bones sees this lady in the hospital who's on dialysis? "Dialysis?" he exclaims in horror. "It's the stone age!" And then he gives her a freakin' pill and she grows a new, functioning kidney? Yeah. That scene always makes me want to cry.)

His dialysis is of the kind that requires a fistula, which is where (I think) they sort of fuse a bunch of the vessels in the arm together to make one big 'rope' that the dialysis machine plugs into. (Do not take my description for it, though, my understanding of it is very limited.) This results in a kind of freaky-looking thing on my brother's arm, it looks like there's a U-shaped snake living under his skin. He doesn't seem to like the way it looks (understandably), because he likes to cover it up with armbands. But they're uncomfortably tight for him, and he recently had to undergo some corrective vascular surgery on the fistula that increased the girth of his arm even more, so now the armbands are really too tight.

So he thought I could knit him some. Of course I could never say no to that. Geez.

So, based on the measurements he gave me and assuming 10% negative ease, I doubled up some laceweight crochet cotton in my stash, and knit up the following tube in 1x1 rib:



He ADORES it. Yay! The only problem is that it is too loose - when he flings his arm forward, the armband slides down to his wrist. So he came over a few nights ago and we figured out that I should only be casting on about 56 stitches. All other aspects of it are perfect, apparently.

I'm planning to make a bunch, in different colours. Navy, white and black to start, and then later maybe red and dark green. All from the stash, so no problems there.

Labels: armband1