I never understood why people put the TLDR at the end of a post. It should go at the beginning so readers can make an informed decision on whether or not to read the whole thing. In this case, the TLDR is that my kidneys have failed and I need a new one, which I will now be getting in a couple of weeks. Now you can skip the long part and consider yourself reasonably up to speed, or continue reading for insight and color into the whole affair. I'll try to make it an interesting read.
Some people here already know bits of the story, but here goes for everybody else who might be interested.
The longer version of events is that my kidneys started to crap out on me about 5 years ago. Coincidentally, right before I started posting regularly on this forum. This came to my attention when I woke up and could see nothing but green in my right eye. This happened on a Saturday, so it was a fairly stressful weekend before I could get to see my eye doctor, who's a real dick. He spent about 2 minutes in the room, said it's an aneurism behind your retina, and you need to go to a specialist. The retina specialist was not a dick, but was a cranky old bastard. It was 1700 when he got to me, said it looks like hypertension to me, what's your blood pressure. His nurse came in, took my blood pressure, said wooowww!, took it again, and reported 270/165. The cranky old bastard said that his medical recommendation was to drive to the nearest emergency room (right across the street), tell them I'm very sick and ask them nicely to save me. I followed his advice. Interestingly, as I was leaving I asked if my eyesight would return, and the old bastard says: "eyesight! Look, my wife has dinner waiting at home for me and you're fixing to die. I honestly don't care about your eyesight. I'll tell you what, if you're still alive next month, come see me and we'll work on your eyesight then."
Emergency rooms are nifty places. In the lobby they took my BP (took several tries; the new automated ones don't expect people that far out of range), and about 6 tubes of blood. When they got me into a room about 45 minutes later, they'd already done complete workups. The ER doc whips out his tricorder, says "check, check, check, bingo. Your kidneys suck." The medical side of this is that the kidneys have a good deal of control over BP, and high BP damages kidneys. Once one starts the other, you get a chain reaction and things go to shit really quickly.
After five days in the hospital getting my BP under control I learned a few things. According to Dr. Kidney, my kidneys were "hobbled" now, and would likely not last as long as the rest of me. Dr. Heart said my enzyme levels suggest several small heart attacks, but other than being remarkably strong because of all the work it had been doing maintaining that BP, it was fine. When I asked for a time frame, my hospitalist (a real cunt, frankly) said she didn't think I had five years. Cunt though she may be, she pretty much hit that one out of the park. The transplant could actually be five years to the day.
Interestingly, I can tell you exactly when I had two minor heart attacks, although I certainly didn't realize what they were at the time. One was waiting in cranky old bastard's waiting room (4 fucking hours is too long in a waiting room). The other was during Acid Rain at the Downey show. Never mentioned it here before, but frankly 800 attendees and a helluva lot of DVD owners owe me a good deal of thanks for not kipping over dead and disrupting that wonderful fucking show. At the time I assumed I was just being knocked on my ass by Senior Petrucci, Rush had done that to me once, but now I know differently.
Interestingly, the next day I road every single coaster at Magic Mountain. In retrospect that was probably a stunningly dangerous thing to do, but who knew.
Anyhoo, shortly after my release from the hospital I started posting here and working on keeping my kidneys in check. Thankfully (or perhaps not), the only thing that I could do was keep my BP under control. Dr. Innards set me on a good course of meds which did just that with a minimal amount of side effects. For the last five years I've generally felt just dandy, and my BP is on the border of hypertensive, but compared to most kidney patients excellent. This went on for four years, with very little decrease in my kidney function. For those four years, I was really close to the clearance level that would get me on a transplant list, but not quite. An interesting irony at this point is that my mom would have been a fine candidate 5 years ago, but now she's probably considered too old. Anyhoo, around October of last year my clearance level tanked and I moved right on into end stage.
As an aside, a couple of members here (and one or two at MP's), have gotten stern lectures from me about blood pressure. This is why. Most kidney disease is caused by hypertension. In my case, the CKD came first, which really makes me feel better about the whole thing, honestly. I'd feel like a real asshole if this were all because I ignored my BP; which many people tend to do. Just because you get it under control doesn't mean that you can start ignoring it.
I'll now point out that the golden ticket for kidney patients is to get a transplant before the need for dialysis arises. Dialysis fucking sucks. That was always a hope, but to be honest, I didn't have very good expectations. However, my stepsister up in Phili had offered a while back, and while plenty of other friends and relations had offered as well, she actually moved forward with it.
She's done all of the testing, had her application submitted before the board, and got the call this morning that they'll take one of her kidneys for me. As I told her on the phone, shit just got real.
This creates an interesting psychological issue. While nowhere near as bad as they used to be, kidney transplants are still a bid deal. To quote Moe Syzlac, "making polenta is a procedure, this is major, deadly, life threatening surgery!" Moe was exaggerating a little bit, but it's still a life-altering thing, not the least of which is losing your immune system for the rest of your life. Most people who do this have been on dialysis for a year or two, and are absolutely fucking fearless. They're anxious to get it done because whether they live or die it'll still be an improvement over more dialysis. I have no such frame of reference. Even now with minimal kidney function I still feel pretty damn good. Now, I'm a pragmatist and I understand well the logic of the situation, but it's still a bit disconcerting to know that I'm fixing to have my life altered significantly to treat a problem that from my perspective only exists in a test tube somewhere.
Now that the heavy stuff is covered, here's some fascinating and occasionally hysterical stuff about live organ donations. Insofar as the generally nice folk at the Dallas Transplant Institute are concerned, my sister is a hero and I'm a fucking parasite. They treat us both accordingly. When she was in town for her workup, every person she saw made it a point to tell her that she's a wonderful person and much more important than I am. In fact, she gets a state appointed advocate who's never allowed to meet or even speak to me.
When the procedure happens, we'll each get two surgeons, but the teams won't be allowed to communicate during the respective operations. Her team either moves forward or doesn't, and fuck me and my doctors and our wishes.
This one really cracked me up. The transplant board had to approve her application, and nobody with the institute is allowed to tell me their decision until they tell her. The reason being that they give her yet another opportunity to back out, and should she choose to do so, they'll lie to me and say she was denied for medical reasons.
Once they remover her kidney, she can't have it back. If I die on the operating table (her hypothetical scenario was a DART bus crashes through the wall and crushes me during the surgery), they'll wake her up to ask her what she wants done with the kidney, but putting it back into her will not be an option.
An interesting perk to kidney donation: if she gets into an accident, or is shot in the gut, or develops CKD herself, she automatically moves to the top of the waiting list. She also got a prepaid Amex card from Uncle Sammy with her name and "LIVING ORGAN DONOR" emblazoned across it. Pretty nifty, and seriously kicks the shit out of my "member since 91" crap.
So that's the story. For obvious reasons I'll probably be curtailing my DTF activity a bit. I'm going to try and go somewhere between now and the surgery, perhaps back out to Cali.; there's a roller coaster I really want to ride out there. For the people in my fantasy league, I'm not sure what the deal with that is yet. I'd really like to play, and I think I'm going to have a shit-ton of free time to manage it, but I seriously doubt I could take on all of the commissioner work. If there are any must see shows on the West Coast this month, somebody let me know. I always try to hit a show when I travel. And if anybody has any questions, fire away. The whole thing is really quite fascinating. And congratulations if you read the whole thing.
Topic: Episode 37: Barto hasn't destroyed his kidney yet (Read 10744 times)
