1. Shortly after noon o'clock, I met with Kootenai Health's Dr. Bieber, nephrologist, at the Shoshone Medical Center's Smelterville clinic.
I'd seen the results of the labs I had drawn a week ago. I'd heard from the transplant team in Spokane. Dr. Bieber confirmed what I thought to be true: the blood work didn't raise a single red flag and while we might wish the protein in my urine would disappear, that situation is not getting worse. It's stable. The condition of my new kidney is very good -- we seem to have minimized the impact of the early signs of rejection that emerged about three months ago.
2. Dr. Bieber and I had a good discussion of a problem I've never had in these twenty years of focus on and treatment of my kidney disease: low blood pressure.
The upshot of our discussion was simple. I'm cutting back on a couple of meds, monitoring my blood pressure closely at home, and if it goes high again, I'm to contact Dr. Bieber for advice on readjusting my medicine.
My cholesterol level has been a little bit high over the last few months. After letting that ride for a while to see if it would come down on its own, Dr. Bieber decided it was time to increase my dosage of Lipitor a bit.
As I've said before, all the kidney pros I talk with are in agreement that, yeah, ideally I never would have had this episode of rejection of my kidney getting underway.
But, it did.
And the Spokane pros and Dr. Bieber are in agreement that stability is good and that when it comes to day-to-day performance, my transplanted kidney is doing its job very well.
In fact, I now have a stretch of two months before having another kidney related appointment. I see the transplant team in late October and I don't need to see Dr. Bieber again until mid-November.
Labs? I'll have blood drawn next week and then I'll find out whether I'll continue to go in every two weeks or if that schedule might also be relaxed a bit -- to maybe once a month....
3. This meeting with Dr. Bieber was low key. Yes, we discussed a lot of details, but in a relaxed manner. Dr. Bieber and I get along well.
Nonetheless, this appointment knocked me out.
Fortunately, I didn't have anything I had to do this afternoon and so I could eat lunch, sit still for a while, and eventually go back to bed and enjoy a deep sleep in which I lost all sense of time and place and wasn't quite sure when I woke up just where I was.
Copper straightened me out.
My afternoon nap gave me a pretty good boost of energy and it felt good to be running on a fuller tank through the evening until I retired later.
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