Sh*t Happens

Another year gone by before my very eyes. So much has happened and I’ll try my best to summarize on what has been going on.

After receiving my kidney from my brother in 2013, things have been going absolutely wonderful. There really is no reason to complain as I am in great health, my creatinine is down to 1.30 and has remained stable, and I have been feeling the best I have ever felt in a very long time.

What I didn’t mention before was that towards the end of 2015, my husband and I were planning to finally start our family and prepare my body to become pregnant. My kidney specialist assured me that many of his kidney transplant patients have been able to get pregnant and have had successful pregnancies. In order to prepare my body to become pregnant, I would need to be completely off Cellcept for three months and then we could try and conceive.

At my final month of being off of Cellcept, and thinking how exciting this will be when I am finally able to become pregnant!, I had taken a blood test only to find that my creatinine had shot up to 2.51. I was admitted to the hospital on 12/01/15 (something about the beginning of December where I tend to always be in the hospital) where I would later undergo an ultrasound and biopsy. As it turned out, I was experiencing kidney cellular rejection and would need to go through three treatments of Thymoglobulin, which is a medication used to prevent and treat kidney rejection. This medication was done by infusion and took around 4-6 hours depending on the dosage.

After being discharged from the hospital, I started to experience diarrhea. At first it seemed like nothing and maybe it was because of something I ate, but the diarrhea became more often and soon I wasn’t able to eat much of anything because of how bad it had become. I wasn’t hungry, and quite frankly, was scared to eat or drink anything because of how bad my diarrhea was.

There were a couple nights my husband was so worried, he took me to emergency to find out why I was having so much diarrhea. The doctors also couldn’t tell exactly what the problem was. Getting out of the house was a challenge, because I never knew when it would come on and even though I hadn’t eaten much or had anything to drink, the diarrhea would still happen at unexpected times. It was taking its toll on my life, not wanting to go anywhere, not wanting to eat or drink and worrying my husband more than anything. I went to see a Gastroenterologist where they did an endoscopy and a sigmoidoscopy but the results came back normal. My kidney specialist decreased my dosage of Cellcept thinking that the medications could have been the cause of the diarrhea but when that didn’t work, they suggested taking a probiotic. The probiotic ended up not helping and no one could tell me what was wrong with me or why I was experiencing such severe diarrhea.

In the beginning of January 2016, I was admitted back into the hospital to receive more treatments because my doctors were not happy with my creatinine level. I had another biopsy in which they discovered the scarring of my kidney to be little to moderate. I had developed a little bit of an antibody in which was going to be treated with IVIG (which is what I used after my transplant in 2013) and consisted of three glass bottles, an infusion that lasted about a couple hours. I would also be treated with Methylprednisolone (30 min infusion), and magnesium (also an infusion).

After all these treatments, my creatinine level was finally going down but still had the unsolved mystery of my diarrhea. I tried everything-probiotics, decreasing medication dosages, sigmoidoscopy, endoscopy, Xifaxan, and still nothing seemed to help. After 16-17 weeks straight of diarrhea with the longest break of not having it was around 4-5 days, and losing a total of 30lbs, it finally started to subside.

Never in my life, have I ever been more grateful to not experience that nervous, uneasy, sweaty feeling unsure of when you are going to have to go to the bathroom and being able to eat comfortably not having to worry about what the consequences will be. It was such a frustrating/painful experience in the sense that my booty hole was so sore and burning that I was dreading going to the bathroom (I apologize for this information being so blunt but I feel people can relate best, when you’re real and up front with the experiences you go through, as shitty [literally] as they may be). To all the people out there that experience gastrointestinal issues, IBS, etc. I can only imagine what you must be going through and I must tell you, my heart and asshole are with you (salute gesture).



Stay tuned:

First attempt at pregnancy was unsuccessful, so what now?