I hope everyone had a great thanksgiving, is having a great start to the Advent season and looking forward to the holidays and new year. Last time we chatted, it was pre thanksgiving. We had a quiet thanksgiving at home, watching hallmark movies and putting up Christmas decorations.

The week of thanksgiving we had two days of plumbers at our house to fix a water leak, which turned out to be going right across the yard. Then because that wasn’t enough, our cable went out and the only channel that would come in was the Hallmark channel. Its only funny because I used to give my resident “loves everything hallmark” channel, mother, a hard time about hallmark movies…do you think the leads will fall in love? Yes. Big town girl meets small town boy? Yes. Even Mom was getting sick of just the hallmark channel by the end of the week. We spent two hours chatting with a tech running tests only to have him go test something and never come back. Round two of trying last week resulted in all the channels returning after new cable was run. If one more thing in this house starts to malfunction, we are packing our bags for the bahamas. dont worry, we will send postcards. 🙂

Anyways, so last week, I caught the crud again. My team had me tested for rona/flu, but it was negative. We think I picked it up at the ER the weekend of thanksgiving. I had another run of palpitations, chest tightness, sweats, nausea, so we went and got checked out. My labs showed my electrolytes were off, my kidneys were struggling and I was dehydrated. A few hours and some meds later we were on our way home. Who needs sleep anyway? Whatever virus I picked up last week, took me down hard. I would sleep at night, get up, do breakfast and meds and sleep the rest of the day. Being immune compromised, means we are more susceptible to picking things up, but it also means we go down harder when we do get sick. We were able to manage at home, but in close contact with the Transplant Team.

This might be a good time to explain why we are still so careful, as people have asked us many questions. Any infection increases the risk of rejection. It also is not uncommon for the immune compromised to be resistant to medications/antibiotics for an illness and therefore the infection takes over and the body cannot fight it. I have heard of too many fellow transplant recipients who lost their life due to an illness. Some were as young as months out of transplant, while others were many years out. Oh hell no, that is not happening here.

Anyways, I finally started to feel better the end of last week from the crud, only to have severe flank pain and uh, difficulty voiding start over the weekend. So last night we ended up at the ER at 1am after consulting with my PCP, to make I didn’t have at UTI or Kidney infection. We were home by 4:30am, with preliminary results not showing a UTI, but it was being sent out for a culture and we are waiting to hear back. Both my PCP and the Tx team are concerned that I have an infection somewhere in the urinary tract and we will start antibiotics if the culture shows anything.

My kidneys are just brats. My labs the weekend of thanksgiving showed that my kidneys were not functioning well enough, so we backed off my diuretic for a few days. That resulted in gaining weight and then having to restart it at a lower dose, in the hopes my kidney function would bounce back/improve. Well my labs last night, didn’t show any improvement in my kidney function. I talked to my Tx Team two times today, because the low kidney function is what got us into trouble last summer when I was inpatient for two months in Kidney failure. Please Lord, not again. If you could pray for things to improve, I would really appreciate it.

Physically its been pretty rough the past few weeks. Mentally, its been a roller coaster, as I get so frustrated with the constant up and downs. But….there have been some victories. I have had the ability to reconcile with an old friend, after we were both hurt by each other’s actions several years ago. The situation had weighed so heavily on my heart, that it was one of the greatest gifts of 2022 to be able to start a text dialogue, opening the doors to full reconciliation. Taking the time to work on trying to heal the relationship has been really healing and assuring that even despite all the up and down, I can still make forward progress. Being staunchly independent so as to not have to rely on others is a huge trauma response. Being able to go outside of myself and move forward, was a huge gift.

As I look back on the year, I’ve come to the realization that post transplant life is like constantly keeping your head on a swivel waiting for the next thing. Its managing meds and appts to also reporting symptoms and changes. Its also, being able to say right now my mental health needs more attention, the physical can wait this week. Or the next day it might be, I need to devote attention to this physical issue. Its physically, mentally and at times spiritually exhausting. I’ve spent so much time in the last two years, telling myself, when things calm down, I’ll make the time for …. But the reality is those moments come amongst the chaos.

The Christmas season, is usually filled with the chaos and anxiety of the gift buying or the activities to be attended, that we forget that amongst the chaos, we find a little infant laying in the manger. What gift are you going to lay at the manger? Are you bringing resentment, anger, hatred to the manger? Or is there someone to forgive? Is there a need in your community, that you can help meet? Is there a relationship that could use more of your time to foster it?

Hope wins, when the infant child lays his head in the manger on that Christmas night. Could you imagine the difference in Bethlehem if we all ran in there with all our chaos, gifts flying everywhere, the baby Jesus starting to cry from all the noise versus if we walked humbly towards our lord, like the magi, to present our most precious gift, ourselves? Don’t miss the baby Jesus, running after a different ‘god’ in your life. In this second week of advent, I will meet you at the manger.