I dodged a big bullet

Hi guys, I've been lurking here for quite a while because I've been being told for the past 4.5 years that I will need to begin dialysis within the next year, and have long been contemplating what kind of dialysis I would opt for, and just reading about what different people thought about different things. Meanwhile, I was doing everything very well the entire time, with my nephrologist always commenting that I'm doing the best a person can possibly do. This mainly came because we were having an extremely difficult time controlling my hypertension meds. I was literally on the maximum dose of 5 different classes of medication, and it was still hard to control. I ended up figuring out that I had to take two or three of them at a time, and when the blood pressure crept back up, I'd have to rotate to another set. Over and over and over again, typically rotating every 2-4 weeks, and even then it was still hard to control.

I did all of this on my own, he just gave me the medication, and I kept him updated with how and when I would change my own dose. When my labs came in, I read them on my own directly and made my own interpretations, including adjusting my diet if I started to see anything go outside of the reference ranges. All in all, I was able to maintain a relatively stable eGFR of 17, and a creatinine clearance between 30 and 35 for those entire four and a half years.

On Friday, December 1st 2017 at approximately 5:55PM Arizona time, I received a call from Banner University Medical Center, telling me that they had a kidney that seemed to have a really high rating in terms of functionality, and they wanted me to come down to the hospital that night. I went straight there from work. 7:30AM the next day, I was put down for four hours. When I woke up, the first thing I saw were two nurses in front of me, seemingly shocked at how well the new kidney was already working. Not only did it start almost immediately, but it was pushing out a LOT of urine. In other words, it was already hard at work cleaning me out. I guess what the nurses thought was even more impressive in all of this (and I didn't think it was unusual) was that I had been listed for this long and never went on dialysis. Before transplant, my creatinine was 4.3; 2 days post transplant it is now 1.5.

Anyways, here I am a week later, and I already feel like I'm 25 again (I'm currently 35) which was when I was first diagnosed with the very early stage of IgA nephropathy (basically no symptoms at all, at the time.) This feels like such a new beginning. I remember when I first found out that I needed a transplant, I felt a huge sense of doom. But it feels like it's all over now, like a big giant long nightmare come true has finally ended.

I wish, so very badly like you can't even imagine, that I could do for you guys what the person who died did for me. The anguish of suffering with kidney disease alone is terrible, and nobody should have to go through that. Nobody. Ever. And I can't even imagine what it must be like to be on dialysis, which was something I was constantly in fear of for all four of those years. I'm not normally an emotional guy at all, but it tears me up just knowing that there are millions of other people still living like I was just over a week ago.