written on September 1, 2014

It’s Monday September 1 and I’m sitting in dialysis. Unfortunately dialysis doesn’t take a vacation.

The last three days I’ve been doing better, although very tired. I saw a cardiologist on Friday afternoon, seeing if he had any ideas on how to lower my blood pressure. He’s a really good doctor – we talked for about an hour, going through my entire renal failure history and any cardiovascular-related issues. He did an echocardiogram – essentially an ultrasound of the heart. Pretty cool to lie on a table and watch your heart beat on a monitor.

My heart is still in good shape – there’s some slight thickening of the muscle but nothing outside of “normal.” So the high blood pressure hasn’t caused any long-term damage… yet. He had two suggestions – double my dose of clonidine (so now I’m taking .2mg three times a day) and go see the hypertension team at Cedars (I had no idea they had “hypertension teams” at hospitals). I’m scheduled to see them on September 10.

Doubling my clonidine has helped tremendously. When I got in the chair today, my BP was 147/99 – can you believe it? Over the weekend, the highest I saw it get was 181/104 (and that was Sunday). Better than the last few Sundays, where I was living in the 190’s.

The side effects of clonidine have been hitting me hardcore all weekend though – this crazy dry mouth that feels like someone cleaned out my mouth with a bunch of cotton balls and my salivary glands just don’t make saliva. Hard to talk and swallow when you have no liquid in your mouth. The other one is this intense feeling of fatigue. If I’m not focusing on something at every moment, I literally feel like I’m going to fall asleep. There have been times over the weekend when I’ve been playing with the kids and I can barely keep my eyes open. Add the dry-mouth voice to that, and I’m sure there have been times when I sound like I’m going to die. I’m not, I’m just crazy tired all the time now.

Will my BP continue to come down? Hard to tell. If it doesn’t, hopefully the hypertension team will have some new ideas. Whatever that may be, hopefully it won’t leave me so tired all the time.