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 FantasyFinal Fantasy IVFinal Fantasy VIFinal Fantasy VIIThe Infamous Crystals
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…
Creatinineis 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…
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 volumethat I’m peeing now that I have a working kidney that actually does what it’s supposed to!
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!!! 🙂
Granted, I was probably long overdue for one because I can’t even remember the last time I had to toil away in my server closet / bedroom closet for more than a minute or two, but it sure would’ve been nice to do before or after I was done recovering from my kidney transplant so that I could twist and move to mess with cables and heavy servers in such a manner!
But then again, power outages come at a time when we least expect it, which is basically what happened about a week ago in the early hours of my birthday when we lost electricity for about two hours and when it came back up, my NAS decided that it didn’t want to…
For reference, the server in reference is a Dell PowerEdge C2100 – yes, it’s pretty old, but it gets the job done for now.
My first suspects were all power-related, figuring that maybe a power supply went bad when the electricity came back on or something. I did notice a battery error on one of the UPSes, which was odd because one ran out of juice and the other didn’t, but in hindsight I think that was an unrelated way of reminding me that it’s time to replace the batteries in them – makes sense, considering I bought them back in 2019!
For the longest time, I was at a loss because essentially the lights on the power supplies told me that it was getting power, but a single, non-flashing orange light on the front indicated a hardware failure that prevented booting. I started stumbling through Dell’s troubleshooting guide of unplugging components until I could get it to boot and was about ready to cry when I found a random forum post hinting to try resetting the CMOS via a really tiny jumper that was a pain in the ass to find, and suddenly it booted!
Once!
It spit out all sorts of random errors and sometimes even random characters while it was trying to boot, eventually telling me that it couldn’t find the boot device (which is a USB drive for Unraid) and then went silent again when I killed the power to try a reboot.
After a couple of rounds of resetting the CMOS to work through the various settings changes and watching them disappear shortly thereafter, it clicked that maybe it was the actual CMOS battery that had died, which was correct because once I replaced that … and also plugged back in one of the SATA cables for the backplane for the disks, it started booting fine!
But it still wouldn’t boot into Unraid.
Well, chalk one up to Oops because it turns out that *I* had unplugged the dongle for the USB boot drive when I was trying to locate that CMOS jumper, and although I had replaced it, I guess I must’ve put it in backwards or something because after reorienting it, I was able to go into BIOS and it actually saw the USB as a boot option finally!
So thankfully after a full week of dabbling with this thing a few times a day for as long as I could crouch down in the closet, it’s finally back online and now I just have to endure a 2.5 day parity check because Unraid failed to shutdown nicely when my UPS ran out of battery.
A couple of follow-ups:
I need to look into that and make sure all of my servers are set to gracefully shutdown if they switch to UPS power for more than, say, a minute. We get a lot more flickers than actual outages where we are, so that should be the best scenario to shoot for.
I also need to replace the batteries in those UPSes … which wouldn’t be so bad at about $25 a piece except that each one contains three batteries!
And lastly, but most urgently, I need to verify that the right BIOS is now running because one goofy bug that I encountered when I first got this machine was that the newer BIOSes from Dell didn’t control the fans correctly, thus resulting in it absolutely screaming all of the time, which my wife does not approve of! Backing down to a specific, lower version fixes it, and I even know exactly which one because apparently I made my own forum post when I did it back in 2019, so I need to see whether the resets lost that as well or what.
That said, right now I’m very tired because it’s very hot inside of that closet, especially with one server running at full tilt, so we’ll see what all that involves and how loud it is with the closet door closed to determine whether I get to it tonight or not!
It’s still kind of weird to think that roughly a week ago, I started off my Wednesday with two (garbage) kidneys and enough anxiety to fill a 50-gallon trash bag, and yet now here we are some 8 days later, a total of three kidneys stuffed in my body, and at least one of them actually works!
It truly was a wild week of ups and downs – kicking things off at the hospital not sure if we were going to have to postpone because I had been carrying a small fever and aches since my final dialysis session two days earlier.
Thankfully, the doctors that oversaw my case ultimately decided that the safest thing for me was to proceed with the transplant, so they did that. I didn’t know until it was behind me and I had woken up that apparently one of my lungs collapsed near the end of the surgery because somehow I got a leak in the cavity outside of it, which filled with enough air to prevent my one lung from being able to re-inflate.
So I woke up in the Trauma ICU with a few extra tubes protruding from my body, including a line literally in my neck, which would’ve been scarier if I wasn’t on so many painkillers at that point!
My first real dose of pain came that day when they wanted me to move from the bed to a chair, and it was easily the worst pain I’ve ever felt in my life. Thankfully, pain-wise I did pretty good from there on out – the next day easily saw it cut in half to a 5 instead of a 10, and soon it really only hurt when I needed to pivot out of the bed. Eventually we did some walking in the hallway with a walker, and another day or two later I was walking without it, the pain now only hitting me when I hit certain positions and I can usually sit in one place without any pain whatsoever.
Along side all of the physical therapy, they also started scrutinizing my oxygen levels because they would be fine while I was walking, but randomly dip when I was just sitting and watching TV. Eventually as the other hoses began to get removed, they narrowed their focus on the O2 and found that it wasn’t hitting the levels necessary for sending me home with oxygen, and eventually after a lack of symptoms we had to say good enough.
I think one of my scariest times was last week when my new kidney hadn’t quite picked up its pace at processing urine and filtering out old toxins yet, to the point where they were considering putting a dialysis catheter back in so that I could go get an emergency session if necessary. Thankfully, my Creatinine and GFR continued to see tiny bumps that were more encouraging, so they said that was no longer necessary, which I was particularly grateful for.
Even today, there were new questions about my heart because I guess it was creating a bizarre waveform while I was sleeping, and only while I was sleeping! The cardiologist finally came by and explained that it wasn’t necessarily good or bad, just odd, which is a good overall summary of my health to date, too.
And so late this afternoon, on day #8 after my transplant surgery, they finally cleared me to go home and gave me a huge binder of information to read along with an even bigger bag of pills that I’ll need to take for the rest of my life in order to keep my new organ from feuding with my cranky body.
Admittedly it’s still really overwhelming, but frankly that’s why I’ve got the next couple of months off from work to adjust to new habits and figure out the best ways of taking care of myself to make this sucker last as long as possible!
Oh yeah, and I also literally go back to the Transplant Clinic three times a week for the next month so they can follow my labs and adjust my meds accordingly, so I still feel like I’m in pretty good hands.
I’m sure I’ll have much more to write in the future as my brain begins to decompress from all of this, so right now I just wanted to cover – it worked, I’m home, and I’m ready for the next mountain that life has for me to climb.
Well, metaphorically, anyways – I’m pretty sure I won’t be climbing anything larger than my bed for the near future while these latest scars in my torso take their time to heal!
Welcome to the next chapter in Scott’s life – here’s hoping that it’s a good one…
Today is my second to last dialysis treatment before my kidney transplant next week, so I thought I’d try to pass some of my four hours of blood filtering with a random brain dump of thoughts that have crossed my mind recently.
How many traffic accidents could be prevented just by people staying in their damn lane?! I see so many people weaving in and out of traffic on our roads, only to save what – half a minute on their travel time??? Your safety and that of everyone else on the road is far more important!
Politics is just depressing these days. I’m so tired of seeing what new thing Trump found to destroy on a daily basis.
I think so many aspects of our lives would improve if everyone dialed back the judgment of each other. Whether it’s family or co-workers or even strangers at the grocery store, 99% of the people around us don’t know everything going on in our lives or the challenges we’re currently facing, so just chill and give people the benefit of the doubt.
In remote work, we have an acronym – API, or AssumePositive Intent – and I think it applies in a lot of areas of our lives, namely when interacting with other people. It’s pretty simple – just don’t assume someone is acting maliciously because things didn’t go the way you expected.
I’ve written about it before, but I think this next phase of my life is going to focus a lot on embracing passion as a way to filter out negativity, particularly but not limited to all of the noise online. We only get so much time on this pale, blue dot of ours and I’m tired of wasting any of it on being angry about things that are outside of my control.
It’s amazing the variety of people around us who we never really know. Right now in dialysis, I can see one person watching Thor, another watching one of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, and a third watching Friends. And we’re all just trying to get through another session!
There’s a lot to be said for “Not yucking someone’s yum.” If somebody enjoys something and it’s not hurting anybody, let them enjoy it. I used to hate country music growing up just because it was the opposite of rock music and it felt like we were supposed to, but now … who really cares?! Just because it’s not what I want to listen to doesn’t mean it sucks and it means a lot to some people just like rock music means a lot to others. Let people enjoy their football or bowling or Dungeons & Dragons or collecting shiny rocks or whatever the case may be – those kinds of passions are what make our lives worthwhile!
I’m starting to come around on unnecessary movie sequels for the same reason. I personally don’t care for them, but their existence doesn’t ruin the original that I might’ve loved. Creating a new Ghostbusters movie doesn’t ruin those first two movies that were absolute classics when I was growing up. If you don’t want to watch them, then just don’t watch them…
Dialysis, and modern medicine in general, are amazing technological advances … yet I’m not going to miss coming here one bit after next week!
P.S. Please remind me of this whenever I grumble about working out instead of having to go to dialysis once I’ve recovered…
Having now spent five solid weeks in hospitals this year alone for all sorts of infection-related issues, I’ve noticed a pattern where as I get closer to getting better and going home, it starts to hit me just how incredible modern medicine and its providers can be…
Like this morning, they did an echo to make sure my heart hadn’t gotten damaged by this infection and I was able to lay there on my bed and actually watch my own heart beating, complete with seeing how my blood was flowing through it!
Or how these annoying electrodes connected to my chest allow me and a bunch of nurses real time access to my heart rate, which was pretty elevated when I got here but thankfully has mostly returned to normal now.
Or even the new straw that they stuck into my shoulder this morning to replace the infected dialysis catheter that got removed on Tuesday so that I can continue receiving lifesaving dialysis to filter the toxins out of my blood because my kidneys don’t really work anymore.
At least, the dialysis part applies for another 5 sessions until I lay down on a table with bright lights overhead once more, this time to put another human’s donated kidney into my body to take the place of my broken ones, which is a thing that modern medicine actually does now instead of just letting people die of organ failure like they did only 70 years ago!
It’s both amazing and terrifying how this collection of organs and flesh and bones work together to make up life as we know it as humans, and that we’re able to “fix it” in the miraculous ways that we are today, however something that I’m also becoming more keenly aware of is that there are also things that we can’t fix as well as risks that come along with the fixes that we can do that I don’t want to think about, but can’t help but consider because I have a family waiting for me at home who I’m nowhere near ready to say goodbye to yet.
So 12 days left until I give our medical system another spin and our biggest collaboration to date! We can do this, science – I have 99% faith in you…
One thing that I’ve learned about kidney transplants in the last two weeks is that there isn’t just one approval, there’s a zillion of them.
Two weeks ago, it was the approval from the Kidney Transplant Clinic’s board deciding to take on my surgery after reviewing about a dozen different tests from both myself and my donor.
Then a few short days later, it was the financial authorization from my insurance agreeing to actually pay for the half a million dollar, lifesaving surgery … which almost threw a hiccup when they said they wanted me to redo a bunch of testing as well as some new testing, only to go ahead and approve it anyways a day later!
Today’s round of approvals were in the form of pre-op testing where I had to redo a select handful of tests to make sure that nothing has changed that could impact the surgery … and thankfully, nothing has so far.
The next two weeks are kind of a quiet period where theoretically nothing should happen, but I have to be on high alert and let them know immediately if anything at all changes with my health. It’s also not the time to go out and get a shiny, new vaccine or change my meds because everything hinges on the snapshot of me in this moment.
And then one week prior to surgery, my donor and I will both go in for one last blood draw to verify that we’re still a match with tissue typing and a bunch of fancy biology stuff that was well beyond my aptitude in college.
Then comes the transplant itself.
It’s definitely starting to get all the more real the closer we get. Today I met with several different doctors and nurses on the team and went over everything from what to expect from the surgery, recovery, and beyond. It’s … alot … to the point where I think it’s important to quantify it not as reaching a goal, but instead getting over one hill with another new one to challenge me right on the other side.
One described the recovery process by saying, “I don’t expect for you to feel better on day four than you do today, however by week four I expect you to say that you feel much better than you do today.”
And I can accept that – in essence, I’m trading one set of challenges with dialysis and fatigue and exhaustion for another set of my body learning how to use this new organ without trying to kill it, while also physically recovering from having my belly split open.
It does sound like they will not be removing my giant, old kidneys at this stage – namely because it’s too dangerous to do everything at the same time, however I’m still hoping that we can revisit the topic once I’m healed so that I can give exercise and good health a real, honest shot this time. Baby steps…
I’ve been thinking more about the impact and what this transplant means to my future so that I can try to put it into words for my donor before the actual surgery. No idea how my wife or I are going to get through the time leading up to the OR without crying, but I think in truly profound moments such as this, that’s to be expected. If I can hold back my tears while I’m saying goodbye to the kids so as to not spook them with the inherent risk of surgery in general, that’s good enough for me.
We also desperately need to get this house cleaned before then so that I don’t have tripping risks every three feet when I come home, so that sucks!
I stumbled across Yungblud about a week ago when I was listening to some of the acts from Black Sabbath’s farewell tour. He did a show stopping rendition of Changes, which eventually led me to download his latest album, Idols, which in turn I’ve been pretty much listening to non-stop since…
One of the things that really appeals to me about his music is how you can hear and feel the emotion that went into the songs. I’ve listened to a handful of interviews with Dom (the artist) and he’s refreshingly upfront in talking about his mental health and trying to improve himself, and it really comes through in the music, too, as he takes on some tough topics like child abuse and depression and one of my personal favorites – change.
I guess I relate to this song as I feel myself facing some pretty big changes in my life with the kidney transplant, among other things. I love how the words talk about welcoming change and what it brings to our lives instead of dreading it like most of us do. It’s a really upbeat rhythm that I find myself listening to in the car a lot as I drive back and forth to dialysis.
It takes a lot of guts to put yourself out there like this album does, scars and all, to say this is how I felt yesterday, and this is howI’m feeling today, and that’s ok because I’m a work in progress.
I haven’t dove into his back catalog yet because I’ve heard that the music is much different than this one and I’m so in love with it, but I’m still looking forward to seeing what else is out there even if it doesn’t wind up in my general rotation.
