"It was a bloodbath": Rare dialysis complication can kill patients in minutes — and more could be done to stop it

Nieltje Gedney was half-asleep in her West Virginia home, watching murder mysteries over the hum of a bedside hemodialysis machine, when she felt something warm and wet in her armpit.

A needle inserted into her arm had fallen loose, breaking a circuit that the machine used to clean her blood. It was still pumping, drawing and filtering blood as designed, but the blood was now spilling into her bed instead of returning to her body.

Gedney, a leader of the Home Dialyzors United support group, knew what to do. Armed with a decade of experience with hemodialysis, she calmly applied pressure to her arm and pressed a red button that turned off the pump. Her blood loss stopped. In the seconds that her needle was loose, Gedney had soaked through her pajamas, bedsheets, and quilt.