More bad news I’m afraid: we find out a couple days ago that J can’t be my donor. Mom and TK are still in the process of getting tested, so hopefully we have better luck with one of them. Fingerscrossed!

In the meantime, my health is not in total freefall — my labs from last week came back and my estimated GFR popped back up to 11, phwew! Unfortunately, I still feel like shit more than I do not feel like shit lately and if I don’t find a kidney soon, dialysis is pretty much imminent. I had an appointment with Josh yesterday to check-in and go over options. We talked about my recent symptoms and everything’s pretty consistent with uremia due to kidney failure, I can only expect it to get worse as waste continues to build up in my body. The only thing I can really do is continue watching my diet and educate myself on dialysis so I know what I want to do if/when the time comes.

Josh referred me to a dialysis info session I have to go to, but he gave me a brief overview.

There’s two types of dialysis: hemodialysis and peritoneal dialysis.

Hemodialysis is what people traditionally think of — a catheter or fistula is hooked up and blood is removed and filtered through a machine before it’s returned to my body. I got a taste of this while I was in the hospital, as the plasma aphaeresis treatments I was getting were a very similar process. I would have to do this every other day or so at a special facility and it would take about 4 hours. That’s a pretty substantial chunk of my week.

Peritoneal dialysis is, as Josh has described it, “underutilized”. It involves hooking up a tube into my abdomen through which fluid can be added and removed. This fluid flushes my abdominal cavity and removes wastes from my blood by using the lining of my abdomen as a filter. This can either be done a few times a day, or with the help of a machine, every night while I sleep at home. This puts a lot of responsibility on me to stick to a schedule and keep my tube site super clean and figure out how much fluid I’m supposed to use, but it lets me have a more flexible schedule and normalish life. It also does the job my kidneys should be doing every day again, so I should feel better more often and I’ll be able to eat potassium again. Josh really tried to sell me on this peritoneal dialysis and he did a good job, but I still need to obsessively google everything so I can make an informed decision.

Ideally, I’d still like to find a kidney and avoid dialysis entirely. But Josh said it’s important I don’t let myself get completely rundown before starting dialysis, and I just don’t have that many kidney donors in the testing pipeline right now, so better to get my ducks in a row before it’s an emergency.

If you’re healthy and you’d like to give me your kidney, please read this post.

In other news, I don’t have to take the antibiotics I’ve been on for 3 months anymore and we’re going to continue tapering down my steroids! A mg a week until I’m down to 5mg. Very exciting!