And the fun continues

Just to make my day even better, I have another doctor's appointment tomorrow morning (I already had one scheduled for the afternoon) because my white blood cell count keeps going down. They are not sure why, but it appears that there will be more tinkering with my drugs. Hope it helps, because this cold thing bites!

Just great..

I appear to have caught a cold. I wanna go home and go back to bed.

Mixed day

Well, it appears that my white blood cell count is going down and they figure they should do something about that. They are tinkering with my drugs and for the time being, I am just going to avoid people who look like they might be sick and wash my hands a whole lot. :-)

On the good side, my creatinine is down to 1.4, which is the lowest it has been since the transplant. Not sure what I did to bring it down, but I hope I keep doing it!

What's going on with my various appointments.

OK, before kt hurts me, here's how things stand: I went to my clinic appointment on Monday and they didn't do much about the drain there. The pain level has dropped quite a bit. I am managing it just fine with moderate doses of tylenol (instead of the Percocet I thought I was going to have to use).

They also sent me to see yet another doctor about the status of the drain and I am not really sure what he was doing this for. As far as I can tell, He just changed the dressing, and looked at the drain insert point and said "it's all good" and sent me on my way. I assume he is just going to be monitoring how things are going but I'm not entirely sure how he is going to be doing that. I have another appointment with him next week, so I guess I will ask for clarification.

The drain is going to be there for the time being. I am outputting about a liter of fluid a day through the drain and they are not going to take it out until I am down to about 100 ml a day. It's going to be a while before this comes out.

And the tally rises

Well, the CT Scan count now goes up by 1. I called my doctor's office today because of some serious pain in my left side that started last night. It made for an interesting night of attempted sleep. After talking amongst themselves, they sent me back to the hospital to see if the drain had dislodged itself or done something else rude that might be causing the pain, but it appears that is not the case. The radiologist says that it is in there, where it is supposed to be, and doesn't know what is causing the pain.

Anyway, I have to finish some work related stuff here at the office and then it is off to home and some serious painkillers and my bed! I am hoping that this whole pain thing is a short term thing and it will go away in the next few days. If it doesn't, at least I have a doctor's appointment on Monday and they can try to diagnose it a little better.

Where I've been...

OK, I guess I let folks know what the heck is s going on with me these days.

First and foremost, it appears that I had somehow dislodged the drainage tube sometime on Wednesday. This, as you might guess, caused some consternation amongst the medical types. Mind you, it took a CT Scan to determine that this had occurred (and for those who are counting, the current tally is 4 Ultrasounds, 1 X-Ray and 2 CT Scans). I had an outpatient procedure to remove the old tube and replace it with a new one yesterday. This would not have been that big a deal, except that someone scheduled it wrong. I showed up at 9 AM on Thursday (after some horrific traffic) to find out that they thought I was going to be showing up on Friday and had fully booked the surgeons for the day. After some running around and rescheduling, they managed to get me in later in the day. The actual procedure was pretty straight-forward and uncomplicated. The new drain appears to be working fine. We'll see how long before something else goes weird.

All of this nonsense also caused me top miss a doctor's appointment. Not a big deal, but that's the first time I missed one.

Work has also been keeping me busy as hell. I have either been at work, the doctor's (or the hospital) or at home for every waking moment this week. I need to slow down a bit.

Visible improvement

For the first time in weeks, both of my feet are their normal size. I seem to have lost most of the weight gained when the edema thing started. My only current problem is that the drain seems to be cranking out at a high rate still. While it has slowed down some, it is still not at a level where they are comfortable taking it out. Hopefully this will get better soon.

Update

I realized that I have been slacking on this for the last few days, mostly because nothing traumatic has happened! :-)

After my last clinic appointment on Thursday, it appears that my doctors are going to try and wait out this drain thing. It went into overdrive for a few days, dumping out something like 1.5-2.5 liters of fluid ever 24 hours. The scary part was that the edema in my leg continued to get bigger. It looks like it is finally slowing down to a reasonable pace (less than 1 liter per 24 hours) and hopefully will continue to slow down over the next few days.

I think the best evidence that good things are happening is that I have lost close to 10 pounds since they put the drain in. I always forget just how much excess fluid weighs! You would think 3 years of dialysis would have taught me that, but what can I say, I thought I didn't have to deal with that so much anymore.

The long weekend has allowed me to spend some quality time off of my feet, which has helped the edema quite a bit. I also went out and bought myself a pair of the compression stockings to wear to help that out some more. As of yesterday, I can finally close the strap on my Tevas again for the first time in about 10 days. I was quite excited about that.
I look quite silly walking around in Tevas and white stocking-like socks, but what the hell, it makes my legs feel much better.

I think that's about it health-wise, so I am going to go play some video games now! :-)