Skip to main content

Post-Op Visit

I was scheduled for my post-op visit with the transplant donor team last Thursday.  All my helpers had left by Monday night and I had asked my sister to come back Wednesday evening and stay over so she could drive me in early Thursday morning.  Well, we had horrible heavy rain Tuesday and Wednesday, so I told her I could make it on my own.

I made it fine; there wasn't any rain so the normal awful traffic wasn't made any worse.  The extra person for the carpool lane would have helped but the trip wasn't too bad.  Then the keystone cops  part of the visit started.  Normally, the clinic days at the transplant center work on schedule.  You go for labs, you go to your appointments.  They put you into a room and the doctor, nurse, coordinator, pharmacist, etc. comes to you.  It's kind of a round robin experience.

Something was mixed up last week, though, and I had to wait quite a long time and then my appointments were mixed up.  The funny thing was that Pat arrived early for his check up, hoping to see me, and they called him right in.  So we spent the next couple of hours going between rooms to check in with each other while staff was coming to get us and bringing us back.  It reminded me of one of those old cartoons where there's a long hallway with closed doors and people dart across in and out of the doors.  The lucky thing is that, although I'm not on any medication now, I still feel as if I'm surrounded by a bubble or a ball of cotton most of the time.  So I don't really get impatient.  I know; enjoy it while it lasts!

My labs were good.  One major test of kidney function is creatinine level.  This has been a major topic of conversation in our house since Pat's kidney function got really low a couple of years ago.  Normal creatinine level should be about 0.6-1.2 mg/dl and Pat's was close to 5.  I think when he started dialysis it was actually near 7.  Not good.

My kidneys, of course, were healthy, and the pre-surgery creatinine was about 0.68.  Right after surgery the level was 1.13, reflecting the loss of half of the filtering mechanism in my body.  Two weeks later the level was down to 0.89.  My remaining little kidney is already picking up the slack.  It will increase in size and function over time until it is handling 85-90% of the work that both kidneys did previously, which is plenty to keep me healthy.  Amazing stuff.  Public service announcement for today:  Drink Lots of Water!  It keeps your kidneys healthy.

The other interesting fact I learned that day was that my energy level, which has been low, might not be back to close to normal for 6 months.  That's a little longer than I had expected.  I can still do what I want, but one walk or outing a day is pretty much it.  For example, after my long day last week where I left at 6:45 am and got home about 2:00 pm, I wasn't able to get myself off the sofa for more than the time it took to make a dinner and eat it.  Then I went back and dozed until bed time.  Not how I'm used to feeling at all.  Both Pat and I have a lifting restriction of about 8 pounds for another 5 weeks or so, which is kind of hard to remember.  We went to Costco yesterday and just bought things that we could lift one at a time.  No cases of cans or bottles!

So everything is good.  Pat came home on Monday afternoon and he's doing well.  We just have to be very careful about exposure to possible infection, so it's mask, rubber gloves, hand washing, being careful about food contamination, etc.  I expect this will improve over time as his immune system comes back to a higher level.  A little change in lifestyle but so worth it!

My prize for donating my kidney:




And.....I did some spinning last night.  So nice to get back to my wheel!




Comments

Popular posts from this blog

I Can't Stand It Anymore

Those who know me accept the fact that I am an English major at heart, if not in real life.  I can spot a typo at 50 paces and a misplaced apostrophe at 100.  I have much more respect for writers (even bloggers and people who post in forums on the net) if they use apostrophes correctly and spell accurately.  In reading one of my favorite knitting blogs just now, I was disappointed in the author (who I enjoy and generally think does a great job of keeping her grammar and spelling top notch) when she made the mistake that I seem to notice constantly lately.  (No, family, it's not putting "at" at the end of a sentence, but that annoys me, too.) Lose vs. loose.  What is so hard about this?  Loose is when your pants are too big and fall down.  Lose is what you've done when you can't find your car keys.  You don't loose weight, you lose it (if you're lucky.) The sweater you knit is not too lose, it's too loose (assuming it's size is too large for you....

Catching Up

It's been awhile since I've posted any knitting, but I have finished a few things. Let's see, I got it into my head that I had to finish my Cozy wrap before our trip to Ireland, so I could take it on the plane as a blankie. Well, I knitted and knitted, so much so that my elbow began to hurt (ack!) but didn't finish. I decided to take it with me as airplane knitting, even though the larger, sharper Harmony needles I was using could perhaps be a problem, but they sailed through security screening each time. (I love these needles by the way, in all sizes. I haven't had any problems with them at all.) So Cozy came with me, sat on my lap, and I finally finished it halfway through the trip. Then I decided that it wasn't long enough, so I packed it into my suitcase and planned to block it out larger after returning home. Well, I blocked it and now it's really long, but I still like it and use it to throw over my shoulders as I sit and knit at home. Here...

Part Three - The Travel Part

In addition to having to get our acts together to leave town with little notice, we found an opportunity to rent our condo for a couple of months during our absence.  This meant that we would need to reorganize and move a lot of the stuff we've been leaving there out of closets and cupboards so renters will have space for their stuff.  Scrambling commenced and we got windows washed, carpet cleaned, closets emptied, garage tidied, and new dining table finished and set up (and old one gone.)  We also had to pack up the stuff we wanted to take home with us (the car might never have been so full and heavy.)  Pat had his final dialysis in the desert early on Friday morning, I went to my final exercise class and we were ready to leave a little after noon.  It was actually a bit rainy, so there were rainbows galore that morning. Our original plan was always to drive to Vegas this weekend to attend the UNLV graduation.  Our SIL, Mike, graduated with a degree ...