Yesterday, November 13, was the six month anniversary of my transplant. This is a significant transplant milestone, and it had special significance for me because my dad died before his 6 month anniversary. At the back of my mind lingered the question whether I would make it to 6 months.
I thank God for these six months of a new life. I feel great, my blood work results have all been good so far, and the only glitch seems to be that my Prograf (one of the anti-rejection meds) tends to build up in my blood and get too high. The target range is 6-9 (don't know the units), but it's climbed as high as 23. Last week it was 15, and my local doctor and the Baylor doctors recommended that I drop my dose down to 0.5 mg once per day, down from 0.5 mg twice a day. The 0.5 mg pill is the lowest dose they make, so taking one pill per day is as low as they can go. At one point early after the transplant, my level got so high that they dropped my dose to 0.5 mg every other day. Some people cannot tolerate the high doses, and it gives them visible and sometimes violent tremors. So far the worst that I have experienced is that I feel shaky, like when you drink too much coffee, but there is no visible shakiness when I hold my hand out.
Because 6 months is a big milestone, Baylor has scheduled me for numerous tests next week, November 20 and 21. On the 20th I'll be doing a 24-hour urine collection, and on Wed. the 21 I'll go in for a routine clinic visit and then in the afternoon I'll have the second Glo-fil test (to test the glomerular filtration rate). My last Glo-fil showed performance at 91%, which is normal for someone with 2 good working kidneys!
The Glo-fil test takes all afternoon, so afterwards we'll drive to Dallas, and will celebrate Thanksgiving the next day with Ramiro's family. If possible we hope to see my sister and her husband at the Dallas Museum of Art on Friday. She's in Dallas on Thanksgiving to run in the Turkey Trot (a 10K? run). The DMA has an exhibit on Quetzlcoatl, the Feathered Serpent, which I'm especially interested in after having made a Feathered Serpent art quilt that was juried into the Houston Quilt Show several years ago.
After the DMA visit Ramiro and I hope to drive around McKinney to see some apartments and townhomes we are interested in for this winter. We have a contract to sell the lake house, and if all goes well, we'd like to spend this winter in Texas, probably renting something for a few months. We thought of renting in Ft. Worth, but since we are thinking more along the lines of buying something in the McKinney-Prosper-Savannah area, it would make more sense to rent there to get a feel for how we like it and whether it would work for us in terms of going to Baylor in Ft. Worth for follow up appointments. We've previously taken a look at an apartment in Ft. Worth right across the street from Central Market (an ideal location!) and we know that would be perfect for us. However, in the long run, living in Ft. Worth would not work as well as living in the Dallas area. For one thing, FW is 40 miles from Dallas, and it's not likely that Ramiro's family would visit. It would still be too far for me to participate in my Dallas quilters' group activities, and we have no other family in the area. My sister lives in Houston, one brother lives in Rockport and the other brother lives south east of San Antonio, so none of them have any other reason to visit Ft. Worth. But my sister travels to Dallas frequently, my Rockport brother's wife has family in the Dallas area, and my San Antonio brother's wife has family in Grand Prairie, not far from Dallas. Of course it al depends on the sale of the lake house. We are scheduled to close on November 21, so we should know more by Thanksgiving Day.
