Hi all,
As some of you may know from my biopsy thread, I'm currently in the hospital being treated for rejection. My question is, how long/how much treatment do you go through before you feel like the side effects and possible damage of treatment itself outweighs the the benefits and chances of reversing damage on the kidney? I've always had ups and downs with my creatinine but my baseline was about 1.8-2.0 with it now being 2.3 and in doing the biopsy they saw antibodies present against the kidney. With the treatment so far ( it's been only 4 days, with a definite 4 more to go) there have been no positive changes. The doctor says that if it doesn't go down they may want to do another biopsy and more rounds of treatment. However, there's a big part of me that's thinking that if the damage is already done and it is not ALOT of damage, and my kidney isn't responding then will another week of these crazy meds end up being more harmful than helpful in the long run? Mind you there hasn't been really much of a rise from 2.3 either. It went up to 2.3 a couple months ago and has just hung out there.
My other concern is that if I don't do exactly what they say that they will label me as non-compliant which is what they thought I was when I wanted to list with them in the first place 5 years ago, so I fear that they are quick to go back to that thinking. It's not that I don't want to do everything to save the kidney, but I also can't afford to be away from work (not making money, while having a mortgage and medical bills to pay) for an over extended period of time without seeing any hope of improvement to rationalize it and knowing how sensitive my body reacts to any and all treatments, I can't help but think that more medication will end up more damaging.
Guess my question is when did you say enough treatment? Or did you just keep trying until the doctors gave up? Can they consider me non compliant for not wanting to extend my hospital stay another week or two for more tests and treatment, when even they have said we can do all of this treatment and see absolutely no changes or improvement?
Any thoughts much appreciated