written on October 19, 2014
Today is day 2 of life with a new kidney.
The surgery happened Friday afternoon and it was a huge success! We received confirmation that Nicole was okay as the donor on Wednesday evening, but we didn’t want to tell anyone for fear the surgery wouldn’t happen again. On Thursday my blood pressure was still 170/100, which was too high for surgery. The hypertension specialist I was seeing wanted to postpone the surgery another week, but thankfully one of my transplant nephrologists said they would take care of it during the surgery. And they did.
So here we are – it’s Sunday evening. My wife was discharged yesterday and spent the night with her parents in a hotel last night. Today she went home to see the kids (we’ve had our nanny watching them all weekend). She’s still got a lot of pain, but she’s doing well. And I’m feeling amazing.
This new kidney has been working like a charm. The first night I peed 15 liters of urine in the first 9 hours. Can you believe that? My creatinine is down to 1.5 (it was at 15 in May when my kidneys failed and it was at 5.4 when I was admitted to the hospital on Friday – normal is anywhere from 1.5 to 2 for someone my age). All of my other levels, like potassium and phosphorus and other electrolytes are back to normal. I’m able to eat anything I want (I am on a low sodium diet – no more than 2000 mg a day, but the fact that I can eat anything I want again is so wonderful). I ate a baked potato yesterday, had pasta with tomato sauce for dinner last night, drank some orange juice with breakfast this morning – all foods I haven’t been able to eat because of their high potassium levels. Now, no worries.
And an amazing side effect from all the urine I've been getting rid of - I've lost 16 pounds since Friday. My weight on Friday was 168 and this morning it was 152. I haven't been this skinny in over ten years - I am so shocked that I even had that much fluid in my body to get rid of!
I’m also down to 3 blood pressure medications instead of the 6 I’ve been on (still on clonidine, amlodipine and carvedilol – my doctor thinks we might be able to get me off the clonidine this week – I hope!).
I’m also on several other medications – two anti-rejection meds (prograf and myfortic) and a steroid (predinisone). I’m also taking an anti-viral (I don’t remember the name), an antibiotic (Bactrim) and an anti-fungal (diflucan). I’ll be staying on all of these for probably the rest of the week. On Tuesday I’m supposed to be discharged and I’ll have my transplant training where they’re going to explain all the drugs I’ll be on for the next three months and when I’m supposed to take them. By the end of the first four weeks, I’m hoping to be off the blood pressure meds completely and only on the two anti-rejection and one steroid, which I’m supposed to be on for the rest the life of the kidney (which will hopefully be the rest of my life).
I’ve got a bunch of tubes still in me – two IV’s, only one of which is active right now, the foley catheter draining my urine and the drainage tube from the incision site. None of which are that fun – I’m seriously not looking forward to having any of them pulled out, but I am looking forward to having them out. All on Tuesday morning.
It’s been a wonderful experience so far. I haven’t really had that much pain, thankfully. I have a lot of discomfort, but the area around my incision is still very numb. The vascular surgeon came in this morning and said he thinks that’s because they sliced through a lot of nerve endings. So it’s possible I’m going to be numb down there for several months, if not longer. Fine by me – I’ll manage to skip out on the pain then.
One of the best parts of the whole experience has been a comment my surgeon made when he received my wife’s kidney. He said “what a beautiful kidney.” He told my parents he said that after I was out of the operating room. I didn’t actually get to see the organ, but I can attest that it truly is a beautiful thing, because of all the wonderful things it’s been doing for me so far. I’m so glad my wife was able and willing to do such an amazing thing for me. Her love for me truly knows no bounds. Now I just have to figure out when we can get that dog she wants.