My wife was not able to donate a kidney because the kidney’s have an extra vein. Making the veins too small to be a good graft. Now they have called me to go to the hospital to get a kidney from a cavaver donor. Even one time, they called us. They had the kidney and looked like it was going to be a good match but because the other doctors weren’t their to harvest the other organs, we were put up in the hospital overnight. When they harvested the organs in the morning, the kidney was not suitable for transplantation.
May 5, 2019. They called again and had me come down to the hospital. Just like the other times, they sent me to dialysis but since it was a Sunday, they let my wife join me to keep me company. We were the only two in the room besides the techs. Then they gave the call to send me to the operating room. So I left my wife and we went in for the procedure.
The next day they went seeing enough urine coming out of my body. They thought it could be a clot so they gave me heparin. I usually have low platelets to start with so the hepeurin just made the bleeding worse. That Tuesday, they went in for a second time and told me that they just tightened everything up. They try not to keep you in the hospital very long. If you got a transplant Sunday or Monday, they wanted you released on Friday. To due that you had to be up and walking by Thursday. They were having a real hard time understanding why I was not walking around like everyone else on Wednesday. I think they forgot all about them going back in on Tuesday. But by Thursday, I was walking around. I was doing what I needed to. They were thinking about sending me into rehab but when I explained about them going back in on Tuesday, I was allowed out on Sunday.
Now after you received a kidney transplant at UF, you have to spend at least the next 6 weeks near the hospital before you home. Our daughter was able to find us a nice place to stay in Gainesville for that time.
Our schedule was to return the hospital Monday, Wednesday and Friday. We did well the first week but the second week being off my old blood pressure pills my blood pressure dropped. They put me in the emergency room. Infection can be very common after kidney transplants.
When you heal up enough, they have a series of procedures you have to go through. One is removing the staples from where they did the operation, but before we went to the surgeon to have them removed we went to the kidney doctor to make sure we were healed enough. By that time I had pulled most of my staples and she removed those. Leaving only a few for the surgeon to remove. They put a tube in your bladder to make sure it can still inflate, since it has been basically 10 years since I used it. Now they have to remove it. They put you on a table. Take your pants off and the doctor tells you to cough hard and zip it is gone.