Friday, May 19, 2006

My last post was last Friday. I’ve had a few adventures in the past week, so I will do my best to describe them for you. On Saturday, May 13, I had my normal dialysis treatment. At the end of the treatment, when it was time to go, I had a very low standing blood pressure of 82/53 with a pulse of 129. I stayed at dialysis for about another hour waiting for my blood pressure to get up. They gave me almost one liter of saline, but it didn’t seem to help. They told me to go to the emergency room because my temperature was up a little bit, I was not feeling well, and my blood pressure was too low. The hospital didn’t really do anything, but I was feeling better by the time I got there. We were in the ER for about three hours before we went home.

Sunday was a pretty good day. I completed my 30-day heart monitor and got to mail it back in. My dad came down to Dallas to be tested as a kidney donor. He had tests all day Monday and Tuesday to find out if he will be a compatible match for me. Please pray that the test results come back quickly so that they will know what they want to do (either use my dad or test another donor).

On Monday, I had an appointment with my cardiologist. I told her of my multiple trips to the ER in the past 30 days and of my low blood pressure, and she decided to adjust my medications again. She changed my Diovan from 120 mg per day to 80 mg per day. She told me to continue taking 12.5 mg of Toprol XL per day as well. I started the new, lower dosage on Tuesday, so I haven’t had a lot of chances to see how if it is helping. The nephrologist also made a change at dialysis, so the combination of the two may be what is working for me (and I am fine with that).

On Tuesday night, I mentioned to the nephrologist about visiting the ER and having the low blood pressure at the end of my treatment. He suggested that I start using UF profile 2 for my treatments. Now, I did not know what that was, so I asked. It is a setting on the machine. Profile 1 is the normal setting. If I come in to dialysis and need to have 2000 ml of fluid removed, then Profile 1 will remove the fluid at a rate of 500 ml per hour for the whole treatment. Profile 2 would start out removing 1000 ml per hour, and drops throughout the treatment so that I am only having 300 or 400 ml per hour removed at the end of the treatment. I would give you the exact formula, but I didn’t record the starting and ending UF rate. When I do, I will plug it in to a y=mx + b type equation and let you know (I know you are excited).

Suffice it to say, the combination of less blood pressure medication and a new UF profile on my dialysis machine have helped. My final blood pressure on Tuesday night was 110/62 and my final pressure on Thursday night was 95/61. I left both nights feeling fine. Oh, and UF is ultra-filtrate, which is the amount of fluid that the dialysis machine removes during your treatment (for those of you that aren’t on dialysis).

I have a few prayer requests for the week. Pray for my dad’s test results. Pray that we will get them quickly so that we will know what to do. Pray for my doctor’s appointment on Tuesday. I go to see the surgeon, and we will be talking about using my fistula and about gall bladder surgery. If I have surgery, it will delay the transplant by about a month (if my dad is a compatible candidate). Pray that all will go well with whatever the doctors decide that they need to do. Thanks for coming by to read today!