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. 😉