All appears to be well.

As was pointed out to me last night, I've been a little lax about updating this blog. The reason for that is that everything has been going swimmingly. My white blood cell count is still in a reasonable range after last week's little episode. My blood pressure appears to be under control and even my potassium level is behaving itself. I'm not sure if I can deal with my health actually going right for a while, but we'll see! :-)

Work annoyances

I go through this every time Microsoft releases a new OS. I hate Vista. It is making my life really suck these days. To no one's surprise, MS has released this thing before it was ready for prime time. In the last week, I have had to deal with it in three different languages, two of which I obviously do not speak. I hate Vista.

Immune system issues

I had another episode of my white blood cell count dropping like a brick. I think I need to talk to my doctor about this. While I know that I am going to have a compromised immune system, I don't think I am supposed to have an immune system that yo-yos like this. It seems like I should not have to deal with this. Why is my body reacting to my medication by dropping my white blood cell count so drastically?

On the up side, they treated the drop with a medicine called Neupogen and it restored my WBC to an acceptable level in three days. The only real downside to this is that the drug is only available as an injection. Despite three years of Dialysis and a ridiculously high number of doctor visits and hospitalizations that involved either injections or blood draws, I am still afraid of needles. Having to give myself a shot, even for only three days, was about as close to my own personal hell as I ever want to get. I'd hate to think of what my life would be like if I ever developed diabetes...

Work is rolling along just fine

Well, it looks like I am going to be back up to full time at work even earlier than I thought. I've been putting in full days since last thursday and I have not been having any problems. Now all I have to do is manage to keep up with my to do list... :-)

Work and such

Everybody wish me luck. I go back to work after new year's. I think I can deal with a close to full time schedule, but we shall see.

Removal of extra parts!

Yay, the feeding tube is out and the trach will be coming out in about 6 hours. That will be the last of the extra parts that have been added to me over the last six months. I have lots of new and interesting scars, but I can finally say that I am all original again. Now all I have to do is to wait for the extra holes to close up. I'm quite happy about this!

Sleep Issues

In current minor good news, I am finally sleeping through the night. I have been having issues sleeping since I got out of the hospital. My only issue right now is that I am oversleeping these days. I wake up at 10am or so. This is only a problem because I am supposed to be taking my meds at 9am.

I'll take getting some sleep on a regular basis though.

More fun

You know, I think the world likes to mess with me. Every time I think things are going well, something comes along to ruin my day. It looks like I am having trouble with my feet swelling again and apparently, it is also messing with my lungs. They are bumping up my diuretic to clear this up. We'll see how it goes.

how am I doing now?

Just wanted to post an update here to let folks know how I am doing. I feel much stronger than I did when they let me out of the hospital. I think I am on track to return to work at the beginning of the year with no issues. I also will be getting my feeding tube removed next week, which is the last of the various tubes they put in m while in the hospital. The trach will be coming out the week after to complete the removal of all the things that got added to me over the last few months. Hopefully, nothing else will get put in...

Other than low potassium levels, it appears that all is going well for me these days.

I'll post more as doctor visits warrant.

Yes, it's true...

I'm home. They let me out of the hospital yesterday and I am trying to finish my recovery. I;m still a bit weak compared to before I went in, but I think I will get back to where I was.

Thank you all for the support you gave me while I was fighting to recover. I don't know what to say!

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! :-)

Hospital woes

When the staff at the hospital starts greeting you with questions like "you live here now, don't you?", you have officially spent too damned much time in that hospital! :-)

Weekend update

Quick update on my life over the last few days, cause it's been busy!

As a result of my Thursday clinic appointment, they discovered that my creatinine level had gone up from 1.5 to 2.1 over the course of three days. They sent me to the hospital on Friday to have an ultrasound done to see what, if anything might be causing that. They discovered a large fluid buildup around the new kidney and my doctor decided that something needed to be done about that pretty much right away. I then got to spend the weekend in the hospital while they put a tube into my side to drain the fluid. It appeared that it had stopped draining, but when they did another ultrasound, they found some more fluid that didn't seem to want to come out. There didn't seem to be much they could do at this point without further surgery, so they decided to send me home, but without removing the drain.

Of course, overnight, the excess fluid seems to have decided to come out. From Saturday at 10pm to Sunday at 6pm, the drain produced less than 200ml of fluid. From the time I left the hospital at about 6 until 8am on Monday, it has already dumped out about 400ml of fluid. Hopefully, it will slow down in the next day or so.

On top of all of this, there was some fun with my drugs. They dropped a number of drugs and it seems that they forgot some of my drugs. It took me two days to get all of this sorted out. Just in time to be released from the hospital. I hope I have gotten all of the changes right, but I guess I'll find out today when I go to my clinic appointment.

I guess I will update more later today after I get the results of the blood tests.