Fresenius Medical Care

Overnight Dialysis

With overnight (also known as nocturnal) hemodialysis, you get about twice as much treatment as you would with conventional hemodialysis. So, most or all of the time, you won’t have a lot of ups and downs in how you feel from day to day. Your treatment doesn’t take time out of your day, so you can go about your usual activities. Treatments are done by dialysis nurses and technicians. Plus, your diet and fluid limits may be close to normal.

If you do your treatments in the facility at night, you can sleep until morning. It can take time—days or even weeks—to get used to sleeping with the machine on and other people in the room. Alarms from your machine or other machines will go off, and may wake you up. The lights will be turned down to help you sleep, and you can bring along a sleep mask to make it darker and ear plugs to help you tune out the noise. Most people do find that they’re able to get used to it. So give yourself time!