The count down continues...

It is now two days before I am scheduled to have my kidney transplant. This is the closest I have ever been before, which makes this an exciting time. Two months ago I was scheduled to have the transplant but four days before, I was postponed.

I went to the doctor for all my pre-operation stuff on Thursday and it was a pretty routine set up. The lab for blood-work, meet with the surgeon, get admitted to the hospital, EKG and x-ray. I was also pre screened for the bloodbank and am now wearing a bracelet with some number on it to quickly be able to match blood in case I need it for some reason. I am hoping that will not be an issue.

The doctors gave me a small blue bottle of soap that I am supposed to use the night before and the morning of the surgery. Although with a 5am appointment to show up at the hospital, I am not looking forward to waking up at 4am to take a shower with special soap. But a small sacrifice is worth it for sure.

I did go to church today. It was a great day. So many people supportive and offering prayers for me. My favorite line was from Lori, "We are gonna give God a headache on Tuesday with all the prayers." Many people were surprised to see me at church, since I am taking the immune-suppresive drugs already. I was extra careful though, after shacking hands with people making sure to wash my hands or use antibacterial gel.

I wonder when I will start to get really nervous. I am not nervous yet, especially since I go to the doctor and/or hospital so much that it just seems routine so far. I am willing to bet that Tuesday morning may be the time for the butterflies to start fluttering around. I wonder if I will sleep well on Monday night? At least I will have the chargers game to keep me distracted while on my final dialysis session.

Ah, final dialysis session. Now that has a nice ring to it!

Well, the countdown continues...

Dreams

Only five days until Sept. 14th, the date my kidney transplant is scheduled. It is really an exciting time for me to dream about all the possibilities that the new kidney will bring.

The things I dream about are not having to be tied down to a machine 6 nights a week on dialysis. I have always told people that six nights per week on dialysis didn't seem that bad. But now that there is the possibility of it ending, it is an amazing amount of time that I was on that machine. It almost seems overwhelming to think back about how much time I have had to endure on the couch at our house, but even more so how much time my wife has gone through prepping the machine, waiting while I dialyze, and then the end of the treatment process too.

Don't get me wrong, I am thankful that they technology exists to keep me alive, but will be thankful when I am no longer dependent on that.

I dream about going out in the evening. This is something that I of course used to take for granted. A quick trip to the store to pick up milk, dinner with my wife at a restaurant, going over to a friends house. Even just driving with my headlights on. I love the feeling of warm summer nights with the car window down and the air being pushed through the car, sometimes cheating and putting the heater on to balance the temperature. Ah, I miss that.

I dream of being able to do projects around the house after the kids have gone to bed.

To actually have an evening of reading, with two hands on a book. I used to try to read on dialysis, but it is tough to hold a book with one hand and turn the pages. Not that it is impossible, but it can be challenging, especially when your hand cramps up.

I dream of drinking as much water as I want.

A couple of years ago, before I found out my kidneys weren't working, I worked at an Audio/Visual rental place. One show we had to set up for was, ironically, the National Kidney Foundation Fundraiser. It was on the lot of Warner Bros and it was an easy gig. I remember one of the main speakers at the fundraiser was George Lopez. He tells the story that he needed a kidney and his wife donated one to him and the one thing he was totally amazed by was the amount of energy he suddenly got back. I wonder what that is going to be like. Will the same happen to me? So I dream about energy.

I also dream about surfing more. I have been surfing since I was 12 years old and love it. I love surfing on short boards, long boards and just sitting in the water with friends. But with my kidney failure I just don't have as much energy as I once did. So I dream about the times in the future that I will have paddling out. A great addition is that the donor who is giving me the kidney loves surfing too. Although it is not verified I am hoping that some of the surf "stoke" gets transferred over to me through the kidney.

But some of the dreams that I am most excited about I am not even aware of yet. The new aspects of life that will be revealed to me after the transplant, but in my kidney failed perspective can't even imagine yet. I am sure that many of those dreams will be revealed to me as I go through them.

New things to me

My new diet was odd. The diet that I was put on, the kidney diet, I was told is the second most difficult medical diet to maintain, only the diabetic kidney diet is more difficult. I had to eat low levels of phosphorus, potassium and fluid. The kidney is an amazing organ, it takes minerals and maintains the correct level you body needs. When you kidney doesn’t work, many minerals that your body needs can become toxic if you get too much of them. Phosphorus is in almost everything you eat, but it is a big molecule and science has created a pill that bonds to the phosphorus molecule, making it too big for your body to absorb. Potassium is critical to heart function, but too much of it can either speed up the heart too much or slow it down too much. I learned that potassium is one of the things they inject when they give a lethal injection, which makes you really want to watch the level of potassium you eat! But there is no pill to prevent potassium from being absorbed into your body, so you must control it with diet. Basically, it means eating nothing healthy…wheat bread, gone. Vegetables, gone. Fruit, gone. However, I could eat unlimited fats and sugars. Great, unlimited mayonnaise and jelly beans (this is why the diabetic kidney diet is so hard, you can’t have the sugars). The third restriction was fluid. The kidney, as we all know, processes any fluid we drink and whatever the body doesn’t need, it passes to the bladder. I was told to only drink 50 ounces of fluid per day, this includes anything you drink, ice, watermelon…anything that has fluid in it. I ate a lot of plain chicken and white rice at this time in my life, but eating the same thing over and over again gets tiring. The doctors are afraid that on this diet you won’t get enough calories, so you eat sweets to get your calorie count up. This sounds awesome, but trust me you get really tired of eating sweets all the time. My personal favorite was smarties, a small chalky candy that comes in a roll with about twenty little flavored round pieces. However, I quickly got tired of smarties too. I wondered what the dentist would say?

My new schedule was odd. Monday, Wednesday and Friday I would wake up at 6am to drive to the dialysis clinic where I would sit for three hours. I was joined by about 40 people each day that had the same schedule as I did. Most of them spoke Spanish, which made conversation difficult. Como se dicen “dialysis” en Espanol?

Although no one really feels like talking, anyway. Even though you are in a “community” room, you just want to sit in your chair with your TV remote or books and live in your own personal space for three hours. I found that most people sleep, however after experiencing the effects of dialysis on the body, most people don’t choose to sleep, they are exhausted and must sleep.

I had decided that I wanted to be productive with the time I had to sit there. However, not being able to move my left arm made simple tasks like reading, working on a laptop, or writing an arduous task.

I stole glimpses at the tired Hispanic man to my right who only had one leg, wondering what had happened to the other. I watched the African-American woman across from me get hooked up the dialysis machine from a port in her leg. She seemed to reject the idea that she needed dialysis, often coming into the center with a 42-ounce Coke from McDonalds. Although the coke looked good, I knew there were extremely high levels of phosphorus and 42 ounces in one shot? That is almost 90% of my daily fluid total!

I quickly learned most people in the dialysis center were there as a result of diabetes. Really? I knew nothing about diabetes. I just thought you had that if you ate too much sugar as a kid, and I didn’t know what it really meant if you had it. But I soon saw the effects of untreated diabetes. The disease attacks the kidneys, which results in the need for dialysis, and if it continues, it literally begins to eat away at the body. As I looked around, there were many people who had different amputations, mostly the toes, feet or legs, from what I saw. Thank you, God, that I don’t have diabetes, but, God, I pray for those that do.

The strange thing about dialysis is that you could drive past a dialysis clinic and never know. They always give the name of the building something like “DaVita” or “medical center.” They also keep the blinds drawn all the time, which makes looking out of them very difficult. I never knew which was worse, having people walk by looking in at you on a machine, or not being able to look out a window and see what the rest of the “normal” world was doing.

I learned what a nephrologist was: a kidney doctor. I had an Indian doctor who was very difficult to understand. Hearing medical terms in that thick foreign accent made it even harder to learn what he wanted me to do. I remember wanting to record the conversations so I could go home and listen to them again and try to decipher what he was saying. Thankfully, I had a very nice nurse who would come and translate the orders that were written down so I knew what was coming next.

The doctor prescribed several things while I was in the dialysis center. The first was Epogen, a synthetic hormone that produces red blood cells, a normal function of your kidneys which I no longer had enough of. One problem though, Epogen is on the list of banned substances for the NFL, so my chances of playing profession ball went from “fat chance” to “fatter chance.”

The other new prescription was iron. I remember this one because when they injected it into my body through the machine, I could instantly taste and smell it. It reminded me of black licorice in a way but also had a metallic sensation too. The syringe looked like it was full of crude oil and seemed thick, although it wasn’t.

At the same time as all this was going on, I accepted a call (Presbyterian for “job” that God has called you to) at a church in San Diego. Of course I had told them about my medical situation and that part of the deal was that they would have to accept that I went to a dialysis clinic three days a week. They were thankfully willing to partner with me and I accepted the position.

It seems that when you are married and have a child that moving becomes a much larger task than it used to be when I was single. I used to just throw everything in the back of the car as many times as I needed to and drove it to the new place. With a wife and a little baby boy, we rented the biggest U-haul you could get and took half the day to load our tiny apartment into the truck. Then we drove, caravan style from Pasadena to San Diego. I was so thankful to be back in my home town, it was just one thing that I knew and felt comfortable with in an uncomfortable and unknown life.