Another Phone Call

**Warning, LONG!**

Hey guys, thanks for all the great thoughts and congrats! I'm home, and a little stiff from that awful bed in the hospital, but had a white pizza for dinner tonight (well, 2 slices, anyway) and am sipping a caffeine free diet coke (physician assistant's orders, phos is LOW!). Ok, here's the story as best I can tell it.

At about 9:30 pm on Tuesday night, my HUSBAND'S cell phone rang, and it was a transplant coordinator I had never spoken to. Anyway, she said that they had been offered a kidney in Oklahoma, and if they decided to take it, I was the first one up for it on their list. She said they were scheduled to go into recover the organs around midnight (Oklahoma time), and she would call me as soon as they knew something. I made myself go to sleep around 11:00, and woke up around 5:00, wondering why I hadn't heard anything. I dozed for about another hour and a half before she called again, just to say she still didn't know anything. She told me to go about my usual morning routine, and even go on into work, because obviously nothing was happening fast.

So I got to work a little late, because OF COURSE my cycler screwed up that night and I didn't finish until late, then I had to pack my bag, "just in case", etc, etc. I got into work about an hour late, but had called one of the managers the night before and explained what was going on, so they were ok with it. The transplant coordinator called me back around 9:45 a.m. and told me to plan on getting to the hospital around noon. That was the perfect amount of time to get my work done and catch up the guy who's going to be covering my job for the next three months.

Got to the hospital at noon, and it was hurry up and wait, because the final cross-match can take up to three hours or more to get the results back, and they weren't even expecting the kidney to get to Atlanta until around 2:00 or 3:00. Thankfully, I had a fabulous nurse who loved hanging out with me and my husband and kept us up-to-date on absolutely any news he got.

Finally at 7:30, the nurse came in and said we had to drain my PD fluid because we were going to surgery. In the confusion, she didn't have the proper Fresenius-to-Baxter adapter, and the surgeon, being a typical surgeon, was impatient, and said that he'd take care of it in the OR. I was on a gurney and on my way to pre-op at 7:35. I even called my son on my way to pre-op. (He was running around my parents' house, yelling "She's getting a kidney!!!" at the top of his lungs. I'm not sure, but I think he was excited!)

I was wheeled into the OR at about 8:00, but had not yet been given anything for sleeping, so I looked over in the corner, and there's a guy in full surgical garb, cutting "extra" stuff off MY KIDNEY! Wow, I even got to see it, that was COOL!

As best as I understand it, the surgery started right around 9:00 p.m., and ended around 1:00 a.m. I stayed in post-op for a couple of hours and got back to my room about 3:00 a.m. I spent most of that day sleeping, thanks to getting morphine injections in my IV once an hour, but then they figured out that I wasn't using my button at all and cut out the once an hour stuff, so I still had the button, but could only get it that way. I actually did not use much. I think I used three or four shots after they turned it off, and that was for coughing, doing the breathing exercises, and moving to a different position in bed. I haven't had anything for pain since probably Thursday night or maybe Friday morning.

The surgeon was ready for me to go home yesterday, but my Hematorcrit was only 7.9 and my Hemoglobin was 23, and the marker to indicate that I'll produce more of those (allucrit) was normal, so they wanted to give me another intravenous iron treatment. Today the allucrit was up, so they were happy to send me home on my pre-transplant dose of epogen (thankfully I still have enough left!).

Right now I'm on Prograf, cell-cept, prednisone, Nexium, valcyte (I've had CMV in the past), Dapsone (to prevent bacterial infections), aspirin, a multi-vitamin and K Phos.

I feel great, my thoughts are clear, I'm remembering things in conversations that I wouldn't have a week ago, and I get to sleep in my own bed tonight without being connected to a dialysis machine. LIFE IS GOOD!

Thanks everyone for all the support and encouragement and friendship I've found here. Y'all are a great group, and I'm here to stay, so don't think you'll get rid of me that easily! Here's to many more transplants in 2008 for the IHD family!!!