Promotional Pricing is a Waste of Everybody’s Time…

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

I’ve spent more time than I’d like to admit over the last couple of weeks trying to negotiate lower rates on several of our bills that have managed to creep up over the years.

The worst of these are always because of promotional pricing where they offer you a reasonable price to get their foot in the door and then jack up the rates a year from now when you’re not expecting it. This concept has always been popular with cable companies with the argument that everybody does it that way, which I’ve always thought was in such poor taste because it basically prioritizes new customers over ones who’ve tried your services and actually want to stick around!

Doesn’t it make sense to reward a customer’s loyalty instead of penalizing them for it???

My preference is really simple – instead of having promotional pricing and the non-discounted rate, just pick something in the middle and that’s your price. It still needs to be competitive enough against other providers, but if one company stops making people chase and fight for discounts, the others will have no choice but to follow.

But you rely on the customers who won’t ask about a discount and just accept the higher price???

Frankly, that just sounds shady to me because eventually those people are going to see an ad showing your newest prices and realize that their bill is way higher, and then what? Then you’ll consider offering them some credits to consider staying when if you had just done the right thing in the first place, they’d more likely be bragging about the affordability of your service instead of complaining about it!

So just for the sake of throwing some numbers out there, here’s what I’ve been through recently…

Frontier Fiber – monthly bill dropped from $114.99 to $89.99 for 5 Gbps service ($300 annual savings)
Chat was useless here, but calling in was a simple, 5-minute call and the guy even noticed an issue with auto-pay that would save me even more money!

Verizon – monthly bill dropped from $191 to $131 for two lines, included dropping insurance ($720 annual savings)
Here I did everything via chat, which was kind of hit and miss – some were like talking to an AI and didn’t do squat, while others went above and beyond and actually got the job done. FWIW, I should’ve been able to apply these same discounts myself through their website or app, but both were broken.

New York Times – monthly bill was $4/mo, to increase to $24.99/mo – extended discount for another year ($300 annual savings)
This one was by far the easiest because I subscribed through the App Store, so as soon as I clicked the cancel button, it came back offering me the exact same promotion as before!

Orlando Sentinel – annual bill was $3/year, to increase to $19.99/mo – found a new discount for only $1/year ($240 annual savings)
Admittedly annoying because the Sentinel makes you call in to cancel your account and won’t let you do it online, but because I already had a new subscription, the call was a little easier … and actually amusing when the rep tried to pitch me their current promotions, first at $15/mo and then $3.50/week … still not cheaper than a buck a year!

I think the newspaper ones in particular are a great example of how messed up their pricing model is because obviously having customers pay $1/year isn’t sustainable, but neither is expecting them to jump from $1/year to $300/year at the blink of an eye when that promotional pricing expires!

If they would just pick something reasonable – maybe $10/mo for a national paper and $5/mo for local news, I’d be fine with paying those rates knowing that I’m actually helping to keep them afloat. But these days when I’ll read articles from a handful of different papers, plus a bunch of websites if they weren’t all behind paywalls, it’s just not reasonable for each one of them to expect $15 or even $25/mo from anyone who wants to read.

I can’t tell you how many stories I click on, only to immediately close them back out because I’m not paying a fee to every damn website that I visit! I might read more of my hometown’s newspaper if they didn’t do that, but I’m not paying extra just for random curiosity at 2am in Northern Michigan. I honestly think that having so much information behind paywalls is a big part of our misinformed populace today, though that’s a rant for a very different blog post!

So the good news is, I saved about $1,500 for the upcoming year by lowering these four bills.

The bad news is, had they just offered reasonable pricing to begin with, I’d have hours of my life back by not spending going back and forth with customer service reps and awful AI chatbots.

Looking Back at 2025…

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

If we’re being honest, and I really see no reason not to be at this point, this was a pretty wild year – both for better and for worse.

By far the most significant event, obviously, was my getting a kidney transplant, to the extent that I could probably just end this post now and leave it at that!

But looking back through my social media accounts and my calendar, there were a lot of other noteworthy things that happened in 2025 and I would be remiss if I didn’t at least give them a nod in this post as we attempt to close the books on one year before moving forward to a fresh slate limited only by my health and the economy and politics and my day job and countless other factors that I don’t even want to think about right now… 😉

  • I transitioned from peritoneal dialysis to hemodialysis.
    Well, technically I did this the last week of the previous year, but 2025 is when I did the majority of my HD sessions – specifically three 4-hour sessions a week for roughly 8.5 months, or a little over 400 hours of getting my blood filtered! No wonder I was so exhausted all of the time! Admittedly I was pretty scared to make this transition because it felt a lot more intense than the PD process, but PD just wasn’t working for me anymore so it’s what I needed to stay alive. I’m not going to elaborate in this post, but it’s hard for anyone who hasn’t gone through dialysis to know what a drain it is on the body, even with my nurses and family and doctor working to make it as painless of a process as possible.
  • I also spent upwards of an entire month in the hospital … before my transplant!
    Not all at once, mind you, but for a few days to a week at a time, I’d get admitted with some random infection, and they’d do all sorts of tests and have me do dialysis in the hospital, which is kind of cool because they come to your room and the machine is way more accurate so you’re not likely to cramp, and eventually they’d let me out on antibiotics … and about a week after they’d run their course, I’d be back all over again. One time also led me to having my gallbladder removed, once was because I caught COVID, and once actually threatened to delay my transplant because my dialysis catheter itself had gotten infected, so it’s really a wonder I did anything at all leading up to the actual transplant!
  • We did have a mini vacation at Legoland…
    Our homeschool group got discounted tickets for the day and I was feeling ok at the moment, so I rented a scooter for the park and we spent the day running around with the kids, doing rides and whatnot before spending the night at the Legoland Hotel next door as a little reward. The hotel was super well designed and interactive, and we loved the room, just not so much the food. I also wouldn’t recommend the COVID that I caught here, but that was basically the theme of 2025 for me in a nutshell.
  • We also took the kids to Brick Fan Fest for the third year in a row!
    Only lasted a couple of hours because I was perpetually sick by this point, but it gave us enough time to do a little browsing and shopping, which was good enough for us – thank goodness!
  • MY KIDNEY TRANSPLANT WAS SUCCESSFUL!!!
    All of the kudos known to man for my amazing sister-in-law donating a living piece of herself to me, along with my doctors for performing the transplant as well as also apparently saving my life when one of my lungs collapsed in the OR … if there’s one thing I felt during all of my medical issues and hospital visits this year, it was that I am very humbled by all of the care and compassion that medical professionals put into helping us get better and keeping us alive. Ultimately I was in this hospital for about a week until they were confident my new kidney was moving in the right direction, and frankly now looking back four and a half months later, I’m very grateful that it’s still performing like a champ in there, cramped as it may currently be alongside my two behemoth-sized former kidneys that are essentially very disgusting looking paperweights at this point…
  • I got to spend some quality time with a good friend who came down to help during my recovery…
    …which was both great and also awe-inspiring as he also happens to be the most productive person on the planet, proven by how he made quick work of so many to-do lists that I’ve been stumbling over for the past year or so! He also got me into collecting Magic cards again, which is a dangerous/expensive hobby to entertain, but I’ve been having a lot of fun with it both through nostalgia as well as the newer sets that they’ve been releasing.
  • My wife and I celebrated our 18th wedding anniversary!
    It’s funny how time gets lost when you’re dealing with all of this chaotic life-stuff, but I’m lucky to have her as a partner and I’m still optimistic that in a couple of years we’ll be able to get away by ourselves for a proper vacation at the 20-year mark!
  • We also got to see Lucy Darling perform live!
    The show was hilarious, but you don’t have to take my word for it…
  • I finished building Giant Lego Mario!
    And the Titanic. And The Milky Way. All in all, I cleared at least 17,000 bricks just between those three sets while I was on leave from work for recovery! Time. Well. Spent.
  • We went on a homeschool field trip to a local aquarium and arcade…
    …they were two separate places, mind you, but the aquarium was cool because despite being small, they had a really great guide to introduce us to all of the animals and there were plenty that the kids got to touch. As for the arcade, they had a HUGE SELECTION of maybe 75 machines each of arcades and pinball, so it was fun to watch the kids exploring the classics that we grew up on while also getting to revisit tons of old favorites.
  • We spent a morning volunteering at Feeding Tampa Bay.
    This was probably one of my most favorite things of the year and I’m already looking forward to doing more of it in 2026. It’s amazing the reach they have here in our local area and I love knowing that we’re teaching the kids that it’s important to help out our friends and neighbors because anybody can slip up and need some help in this unpredictable world.
  • CHRISTMAS.
    I missed a bunch of stuff that I had wanted to do and money was tighter than I had expected, but I did through a series of convenient mishaps end up making a different kind of meatballs in the crock pot pretty much every weekend throughout the month of December!

And last but not least, here are a few things that I learned along the way this year…

  • Gratitude – both for the BIG THINGS as well as the little things around me – the ones that you have to stop and take a breath to notice. Those are the things that carry you through life.
  • Faith – namely that everything is going to be alright and whatever problem we’re facing is solvable. Like the old saying goes, “You’ve survived 100% of the bad days that you’ve ever experienced.”
  • Self Awareness – when you notice yourself becoming something that you don’t like, stop and do something different.
  • Appreciating Grandeur – it’s simply amazing how all of these random parts of the human body come together to make us what we know in life, and likewise how far science has come to enabling us to fix parts of it when they break down. It’s now my responsibility to make sure that the advancements that I benefitted from this year weren’t spent on me in vain.

That’s all for 2025 – happy new year and let’s see what 2026 has to offer us!

Dream Journal : Alien Home Invasion

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

This was a weird one!

It all started with a small, furry, and very persistent animal in the front yard that no one could quite identify. It was clear that there was something wrong with it because it kept charging at everyone, showing its menacing teeth as it got closer but eventually running into a wall or getting kicked to throw it off its warpath. Of course, this only made it more angry until somehow it got kicked underneath the car where it managed to eat its way up into the engine compartment.

Attempting to put an end to it all, I jumped in the car and drove down the street, thinking it would get beat up enough by all of the mechanics inside to put an end to it, but instead the noises it made just got louder and louder until finally I drove back home and jumped out just before the creature ate its way into the inside of the car…

Jumping out, however, I found a new hazard in the form of two alligators on the lawn that by now had everybody running around screaming. We urged everyone to get inside and began locking the front door with an alligator snapping on the other side of it, only to notice that there were still kids and a dog running around on the lawn in terror. I ran out for the smaller kid while someone else called out for the other kid and the dog to make a run for the open door, which they did as I scooped up the small kid and fought off a smaller, young alligator that had showed up on my way back.

Relocking all of the bolts on the door, we looked out the window at the angry animals that were continuing to gather and thought we were in the clear until a bird-like animal with a long and sharp beak walked up to the door and slammed its beak through, as if it was going to cut a hole in the door.

While that was playing out, we soon noticed that we had other problems indoors, however, as we began noticing these small, white, pulsating blobs that appeared to be some sort of eggs randomly scattered around the floors. In one room, part of the floor had actually been cut away and all you could see were these worm-like creatures attached to the underside of the floor as far as we could see.

We knew that the house was a lost cause and we had to escape, so myself and another guy somehow came up with these makeshift flamethrowers and slipped out a back door to where we continued to find more of the eggs scattered in the grass and attached to the outside of the house. We did our best to torch the egg clusters wherever we found them, but eventually heard a broadcast throughout the neighborhood warning not to bother wasting time trying to burn the eggs because you could fry them for an hour without damaging them…

With this in mind, we gathered the others and ran down the street to another house that appeared much more quiet than the one we had left behind. We knocked at the door and were welcomed in, and everything seemed like it was going to be ok until I wandered back to the kitchen and found the Mom opening a tupperware container that appeared to be filled with dirt along with a fresh batch of the same pulsating, white egg clusters we’d found before.

Planning for a New NAS…

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

Granted, this is an upgrade that probably won’t happen for a couple of years, but as my current environment chugs away at adding the first of two new parity drives to upgrade from 14 TB to 20 TB, it’s starting to become clear that this NAS that has been supporting our home streaming and hoarding efforts for the last six years is nearing the end of the line for a couple of reasons…

First and foremost, I just recently replaced the entire motherboard after this giant headache from three months ago that never truly got resolved. The old one had both a CMOS issue where even a new battery wouldn’t retain the BIOS settings and the BMC refused to respond, which is needed for any firmware updates, so I finally spent about a hundred bucks on eBay for a used one and after about an hour to swap everything over, my excess fan noise went away and the whole thing was stable again … for now!

Now second of all … this array is starting to get pretty big.

Ten years ago, having just started playing with Plex the previous fall, I had 20 TB of disks in use total. This year for early Black Friday sales, I picked three new drives up from Best Buy that each have 20 TB of space available!

Plus, looking at my storage array as it stands today, I’ve got a total of 210 TB spread across 18 data disks and 2 parity disks, and all but about 8 TB is in use. So this upgrade, after juggling around my parity disks, will put me at right about 260 TB of data disks, and with my existing chassis (a Dell C2100 and MD1000 disk shelf) limited to 27 disks in total, I’ll have room for about six more until I’m completely maxed out from a hardware standpoint and nearly maxed out from an OS standpoint (Unraid’s limit is 28 data + 2 parity)…

…which if we’re being honest, is my bigger concern because I know that as my array continues to grow and disks get bigger, parity restores continue to take longer and longer, which adds the risk of having additional failures while waiting for the first restore to finish.

In the grand scheme of things, I’d love to see this evolve into a 500 TB or even 1 PB like something out of Linus Tech Tips and I think given enough time, it’s probably possible, however at the same time I also have to think about longevity and the things I can do to protect all of the work that has gone into building an archive this big and making it useful to friends and family to boot!

It makes me wonder if I’m going to eventually have to switch from Unraid over to TrueNAS, which is more capable of housing HUGE amounts of data whereas while Unraid still supports a quarter of a petabyte as I’ll soon be hosting in the near future, they’ve always said that their target audience isn’t for enterprises needing extremely large storage options. Even among power users, I’d still consider having a petabyte of storage at home to be an extreme option…

So here’s the comparison as I see it today, admittedly not knowing a ton about TrueNAS:

UnraidTrueNAS
Disk Quantity Limit28 data + 2 parity disksonly limited by other hardware (e.g. processing power, backplane, HBA, etc…)
Redundancy Options1 or 2 parity disks for entire arrayneed to learn more here, but I believe ZFS allows for multiples with vdevs and pools

Example:
vdev1 – ten 20 TB disks, 2 parity drives
vdev2 – eight 14 TB disks, 2 parity drives
vdev3 – 6 10 TB disks, 2 parity drives
pool containing all three vdevs – 372 TB, 6 parity drives
Disk Size Limitmix and match – no limitvdev must contain disks of the same size, can create additional vdevs for other sizes
How Data is Storedindividual files are stored on a single disk

Result – losing a disk only loses files stored on that disk, not whole array; only disk containing files actively streaming need to be spinning		files are striped across all disks in vdev

Result – much faster read/write speeds, but losing a disk loses the whole vdev; all disks in vdev need to be spinning to stream files from that vdev

I still have a lot of research to do, namely if I can make TrueNAS mimic how Unraid stores data which I think is pretty handy, despite how neat it would be to see those faster speeds. Additionally, I can’t help but wonder if limiting how much my disks are normally spinning has helped to prolong their lifespans, as my oldest disks are currently 7 years old whereas 3 – 5 years seems to be the typical average. In reality, most of the time only a few drives out of the twenty in my array are spun up and in the future, I think I can do some further tweaking with the cache drives to hold newer files longer so that they won’t even get pushed over to the array until users have had several weeks to watch them.

I’m still hoping that we get to build a new house at some point and ideally this upgrade would take place around the same time so that it would be moving into a newer and more accommodating server rack in a dedicated room that isn’t my bedroom closet and boasts better air conditioning and noise dampening to boot! It can be hard to judge how often new drives are actually needed because I often forget to write down my totals each year, so we’ll see if this newest 50 TB lasts for more than 2026 or if I find myself adding more again around this same time next year!

Officially Past the Three Month Mark!

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

That’s right, I’ve had my sister-in-law’s kidney in me now for a hair over three months and sadly it’s just about time for me to go back to work, but the good news is that said kidney is doing swell and as far as I can tell, I’ve been doing everything mostly right – could still stand for a better sleep schedule and more protein in my diet (120g is a lot of protein!) – but otherwise no big scares aside from having to correct some meds to better control my blood pressure.

Here’s a glimpse at my latest labs – you can find some definitions that I shared back on this blog post…

Back on Sept. 24th, my last value for Creatinine was 1.5 mg/dL.

Back on Sept. 24th, my last value for GFR was 58 mL/min/1.73m2, so a nice increase nearly into the range of normal kidney function there!

P.S. No idea why it says FISH on this test – as far as I know, no fish were associated with testing my blood, but who knows – doctors can be sneaky sometimes…

Keep in mind that Tacrolimus is an immunosuppressive drug, meaning that it weakens my immune system to prevent it from attacking my transplanted kidney because it thinks its a foreign body that shouldn’t be there! In the weeks following my transplant, this got as high as 15 and 20 because the drug dosages start out high and then gradually get reduced. The med driving this started at 8 mg daily and is now down to 3 mg a day – it may go down a tiny bit more to see if I can get into the sixes, but right now I’m pretty close to where they want me.

And potassium is a funny one because I’ve taken pills for it for a while with it being too low, yet more than once this spring it put me in the hospital because it was too high (think above 8 mmol/L, which is when I would feel dizzy whenever I tried to walk and alternated between sweating and chills with my fevers. Not fun, and also apparently pretty dangerous because high potassium can interfere with the heart’s rhythm and lead to heart attacks.

This year I’ve found more than once just how shocking it can be to hear afterwards that, “You know, you were closer to dying than you probably realize…”

Thankfully after some digging, one of my doctors added a new pill to test a theory that seems to have improved the way my body is absorbing my potassium pills, so that’s some good news!

If anything, I can certainly say that this whole process has made me appreciate not only how fragile the human body really is, but even more so the level of attention that my team of doctors has to pay to dozens of stats like these to make sure I’m heading in the right direction and to do their best to catch anything wrong before it goes from bad to worse.

As of this moment, they’ve got me taking 22 pills a day, with blood work roughly once a week and my next follow-up visit about a month since my last one. Before the transplant, I was taking less than 10 a day – mostly vitamins and various blood pressure meds.

And although there are a handful that will continue to reduce either as I get further out from my transplant or my health improves to the point where some aren’t needed anymore, some I’ll be taking for the rest of my life … assuming that I’m lucky enough to keep this kidney going that long! That’s one of my top priorities at this point:

  • Raise my boys into honorable young men.
  • Keep my wife happy and wanting to stay married to me.
  • Put enough food on the table and maintain a roof over our heads.
  • Take the utmost care of this new kidney like the priceless gift that it is.

So I see a lot of changes still coming in the months and years to come, just as I already have in the last three months since they cut me open and one of my lungs collapsed but thankfully everything was ok and I came to a few hours later with a third kidney stuffed inside me! If I’m lucky, I’m about halfway through my life and as intriguing and fun as it can be to reflect back on the last 45 years and what went wrong and what went right, I’m also more and more thinking about my next 45 years and how I want to spend the rest of my time…

…in addition to how I don’t want to spend the rest of my time!

Of course, that’s a story for another thousand or so blog posts to come in my future, but right now at 1:34am on a Saturday night, three months after I received a new kidney and a new lease on life, I feel grateful, and content, and optimistic, and hopeful, and loved, and the game plan now is to keep all of those positive feelings going as other stressors in my life ebb and flow as they usually do.

I’ll try to post more about some of my new perspectives on life once I’ve had a chance to wrap my arms around them myself. 😉

Goodbye, Grex – I Hadn’t Used You in 28 Years Anyways…

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

The other day I very randomly stumbled upon one of my earliest homes on the Internet, only to find that apparently it had shutdown, like, two and a half years ago.

This honestly kind of surprised me because frankly, I’m surprised that it even stayed afloat as long as it had!

Spoiler Alert – Here’s a post that I wrote eight years ago both surprised and impressed that it was still online in 2017!

Don’t get me wrong – Grex holds a special place in my heart as one of the first Internet accounts that I held on someone else’s computer, and it was fun meeting people from all over but mostly Michigan to chat about video games and role playing games and whatever other nerdy stuff yours truly was into between the ages of roughly 14 and 17. Nowadays, there’s really no need for a place like Grex when you’ve got forums like Reddit and chatrooms like Discord and social media like Facebook that has managed to persuade grandparents into coming online … even when maybe they shouldn’t, purely for reasons of political expression and a lack of the ability to not share every last thought that comes through their heads online…

But then again, look at me here – I’ve been writing this blog pretty much since the web went graphical and have amassed 1.1 million words read by nearly dozens of people, so I guess that I’m not much better!

Not to mention, nowadays a service like Grex could pretty easily run off of any of a number of servers in my closet, or even on something like AWS for next to nothing. It started as a hobby by computer geeks my senior and ran until it was years or even decades beyond obsolete. As much as it pains me to think of all of the web links that have gone dead either because websites went offline or upgraded and scrapped their old content, or even when their owners pass away with no one left who understands how to keep them running … the circle of life is more like the line chart of life when it comes to Internet sites.

If you’re lucky, you get archived so that people like me can go back in time via the Wayback Machine every now and then for a glimpse at what things were like before social media and ads and spam took over the Internet. Ironically for Grex, they barely had a web presence because the web itself was barely a thing at that point, but since nobody thankfully archived our telnet connections, instead back in 1996 Grex’s homepage looked a little something like this…

I’m pretty sure I had found it years earlier via a gopher search through one of the state universities that we accessed simply from a Host: prompt after dialing in to one of our local library’s modems, whereas many who lived downstate in Ann Arbor, MI actually dialed in directly to Grex as their gateway to the greater Internet in its infancy.

We’ve come a long ways in the last 30 years. It makes me wonder how much of it I’ll still recognize once another 30 come and go!

Or if I’ll even still be able to see the screen without super bi-focals at this rate!

Revisiting Magic via Final Fantasy…

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

Earlier this year, I found myself getting sucked back into the world of Magic: The Gathering by way of Final Fantasy when they released a set meant to honor every single game in the series!

Despite not having done anything with Magic since high school and in fact selling off my most expensive cards when the twins were born to open their college funds.

Side Note: It’s a little crazy that the most expensive card I sold in that batch about seven years ago got me about $250 (Revised Underground Sea) and today that same card goes for over a thousand dollars! Oops…

Anyways, after picking up a handful of cards on eBay just to check them out, I eventually decided to start collecting them myself – first a few at a time from eBay sellers and eventually stumbling upon Card Kingdom, which was actually the same place I sold those cards to years ago … and boy, did it get addictive from there! I don’t want to admit to how many orders I placed from my hospital bed in the first week I was recovering from my transplant, but needless to say it was several! 😉

As I write this post, I have about half of all of the Final Fantasy set – originally it was about 300 cards and I was only 9 away from being done, but then I decided to add the Commander series to my list, too, which brought the total up to 338 of 683 cards, which mind you is excluding all of the stupid expensive ones because this is already expensive enough as it is without some of them being $800 or more!

Anyways, I thought it would be fun to wrap up this post with a handful of my favorite cards from the Final Fantasy games that I did play, beginning with the one that started it all…

Final Fantasy
Final Fantasy IV
Final Fantasy VI
Final Fantasy VII
The Infamous Crystals

Seven Weeks In – So Far, So Good!

Posted on by Scott / 1 Comment

Mind you, I actually meant to write this post a week ago at what would’ve been the six-week mark, but what can I say? Despite being off of work and not having any real responsibilities other than recover, I just didn’t have the time. Or something…

Anywho, seven weeks ago today, I had my kidney transplant and overall, things have been going pretty great!

My labs have shown continual improvement, to the point where I skipped ahead a lot in how often I had to visit the clinic for follow-ups last month, with me just last week switching from weekly appointments to bi-weekly appointments where I can get my lab work done a few miles from my house instead of driving all the way downtown on my off weeks. It’s also been nice that the last two or three follow-ups had my doctors saying, “It’s doing the best that it has so far!” for multiple weeks in a row!

We’ve changed my meds a little bit, but nothing too crazy. At one point I had a bit of a tremor in my hands as a result of my Tacrolimus level being a little too high, but we lowered my dosage and it went away pretty quick.

I also had to deal with some drama between pharmacies because apparently my insurance wants me to fill certain meds with their pharmacy to save money instead of just letting the Transplant Clinic fill everything, and that was a pain to sort out … but it’s done now.

For those who enjoy stats like me, here’s what a couple of my key lab results have looked like since my surgery…

Creatinine is a waste product in your blood from the processing of protein and regular muscle breakdown, which is why people with kidney issues have to limit the amount of protein we consume because our kidneys aren’t doing a good job of filtering it out anymore. Dialysis does a little better, but remember that dialysis is a few times a week for a few hours a day (12 hours/week total for me) whereas healthy kidneys are normally working 24×7.

GFR is a measure for overall kidney function and one of the main determining factors in how far along one’s kidney disease has progressed as well as when it’s necessary to begin dialysis. I believe I started when my GFR fell below 10, and now you can see that it’s steadily improving compared to this chart below:

So lab-wise, I’m doing great, and quite frankly, physically I’m feeling pretty good, too! The fatigue I felt in my weeks after surgery has mostly subsided and my pain is mostly reduced some acute pain when I roll over on my kidney side in bed. I do have some numbness in my right thigh below where they had to cut through a bunch of nerves, which I’m told could heal in six months or not, so we’ll see on that one.

As for my scars, they’ve basically all closed up to the point where I was actually able to go swimming with the boys for the first time in, like, two years, which I’m super happy about because it’s something that I’ve really been missing! It does take a little extra effort standing up because I think I’ve lost a fair bit of muscle along the way, plus my existing kidney are pretty heavy … but it sounds like we’re going to deal with them sometime next year, so that’ll be a relief once those monstrosities are out of my body for good!

I’ve slowly starting pushing myself to exercise just a little, mainly consisting of laps around our loop in the neighborhood in the evenings. It’s not much, but I’m not really supposed to do anything more than walking anyways, so I figure if I can do a little at a time each day, that’s pretty good given the circumstances.

Last week I also got my stent removed that ran from my new kidney to my bladder. It was not fun and I do not recommend through the penis as a method to remove things from the body! But by the end of the weekend, my urination sensitivity had settled down back to normal, so now I’m peeing an appropriate amount, but not RIGHT NOW like my body had been otherwise demanding of me to some less than savory results…

So in summary, things are going really, really well, and from what I’ve heard the same goes for my donor, so that’s good. I’m at the point where I honestly don’t really think about it most of the time, so the new kidney has done a good job of assimilating with my other organs despite being the reason why everything is more cramped in there than it was a couple of months ago!

It’s been slow and steady, but I’m trying to use this recovery time to make some changes that I’ve needed in my life – we’ll go into all of that another day – but for now I’ll just say that it’s been refreshing to be able to focus my attention on the things and people that I truly care about, and in a way I do look at this period as sort of a new outlook on life with opportunities aplenty. My life is worth it, and now seems like as good a time as any to act on those impulses…

You Have No Idea How Bad I Have to Pee Right Now!!!

Posted on by Scott / 1 Comment

The thing is, neither do I because my body is apparently playing post-transplant tricks with me in the form of urinary urges that have literally had me running to the toilet at least half a dozen times an hour!

Fortunately, it’s already known – and actually expected – what the issue is, as a stent is placed in the ureter connecting my new kidney to my bladder to ensure that the path for urine remains clear as my body adjusts to the new organ. Now that I’m officially a month out, we’re about ready to have it removed – I actually have it scheduled for next week, which unfortunately now can’t come fast enough because my understanding is that as I move around, that stent is floating back and forth in said ureter which has become a constant source of irritation as it moves.

For example, I took Christopher to Target this evening for a few things and I literally had to stop to try and pee three separate times!

Walking around that entire store was definitely an exercise in endurance because deep down, usually my mind would know that it was just an urge with nothing behind it, yet with every step the sensation either presses on or even surges upward until the worry of peeing myself in the middle of Target finally drove me rushing to the nearest restroom to spend thirty seconds not peeing before returning to the cart for another hundred feet of torment.

It’s been like that for the past couple of days, with me making a frantic stop at the bathroom down the hallway anytime I’m either going to or from my office. All day long. Really frustrating because as I continue to heal, I’m trying to do more and more around the house to get things in order while I’m not working, however even just walking from one spot to another in my office can be enough to trigger it.

All in all, admittedly it’s a pretty good problem to have, as it’s completely expected and my kidney continues to perform at the best the doctors have seen it each week, so overall I’m progressing rather nicely and if anything, I’ve actually been recovering a bit ahead of schedule, which is great! Before too long, my pee problems should theoretically be a thing of the past and then I can go back to just being in awe at the sheer volume that I’m peeing now that I have a working kidney that actually does what it’s supposed to!

Things I’m Enjoying Right Now…

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

The Good Stuff

  • I recently got back into collecting Magic cards again after about a 27 year gap, and so far it looks like it’s just as addictive as it was back in high school! Except that it’s so easy to buy cards online now, I’m literally getting orders every few days for the half a dozen or so sets that I decided to start with!
  • I also started building this giant Lego Mario set from Bricker Builds, which I bought the instructions to a year or two ago when they were on-sale. It’s a tedious build when you’re acquiring the bricks separately, but buying everything direct is upwards of $1,500 so Bricklink it is! The last thing I did from them was this big Super Mushroom, so it makes only sense that we add something to eat it. 🙂
  • I’m also trying to use this free time that I have to clean up the house in general, which is challenging while I’m in the middle of it but admittedly it still counts as a “good thing” when I’m done.
  • My twins turn 9 years old tomorrow – crazy how the time flies!!!
  • Not working has also been pretty nice, too!

The Challenging Stuff

  • Literally both of our cars are currently having issues. The van is doing this bizarre thing where it randomly turns itself back on after you turn it off, then just toggles the accessories over and over all night long until either the battery dies or it drops low enough to trigger the alarm. Obnoxious either way, and I just know it’s going to cost a fortune if I end up having to take it to the dealership to fix.
  • As for the car, there’s a little plastic pad on the backside of the brake pedal that keeps the brake lights off when you’re not pushing on the pedal and eventually they wear down. I tried replacing it sometime last year but could only get the pad halfway in … and apparently it finally slipped out! There’s no way I can bend to fix it now, so hopefully the mechanic doesn’t gouge us too bad for the five minutes it will take to put in a new one…
  • I still haven’t 100% solved my one server’s issue yet, so it’s running, but it’s very noisy! Even with the CMOS battery replaced, it doesn’t like to reboot without wiping it via the jumper, so at this point it’s either a bad component or the entire board is bad. This is a pain because while it’s technically up right now, it has to go down during the BIOS update I need to make to fix the loud fan controls … and also, I can’t seem to connect to it through the BMC tools to apply the update, either, nor can I apply it via USB. It’s just being a pain in the ass and I’ve been ignoring it in favor of the car issues lately because it’s hot as hell trying to work in that closet anyways and right now I’m out of ideas aside from stripping down all of the components and testing it one at a time, which sounds incredibly tedious.

P.S.

  • My kidney is doing great! I’ll post more about that soon, but no real complaints or issues in that area!!! 🙂