ER Visits 101 – Pack a Bag

I’m months behind on updating my blog again. Sorry about that.

I’ve been doing great in the last few months after my lung transplant. I finally moved back to Florida and have my freedom back. It’s an awesome feeling to be on my own again without needing help, but at the same time it’s kind of scary, like, holy cow I have to take care of someone who just had a transplant!

• I have to make sure all of my 28 meds get refilled on time. Yes, 28.
• I have to refill my pill box with each of them correctly.
• I have to make sure I sanitize everything and avoid all germs possible
• I need to avoid certain foods like fresh fruit at restaurants which may not have been washed properly.
• And most importantly I have to make sure I take all of those pills every day and at the right time.

I’m finally getting used to it, but at first it was almost like someone threw a newborn baby at me and I had to figure out how to take care of it. Thank goodness I’m potty trained 🙂

This week I had a minor set back.

I have been working out much more rigorously in the past 3 weeks by lifting weights and going a mile at a time on my elliptical. I had been extreeeemely tired within those weeks but I thought it was just because I wasn’t used to working out. I was sleeping until 4 or 5 in the afternoon.

Well, one day I got a call from my transplant coordinator saying that my potassium was dangerously high at 6.9 and that I needed to go to the ER to make sure it wasn’t just an error with my bloodwork and to get treated if I needed to. I took off out the door thinking it would be a 4 or 5 hour ordeal if I needed some IVs or what not. I was wrong.

I ended up in the hospital for about 3 days getting this straightened out. It turns out that my kidneys hadn’t been able to keep up with all the exercising I was doing. When you lift weights, obviously your muscle is breaking down so it can build itself up stronger, but when my muscle was breaking down, my kidneys couldn’t keep up. The potassium in my body began to build up. I wasn’t drinking enough water and some of my meds made the whole situation even worse. It was the whole combo, but now I’m all fixed up and ready to do things right.

The only other problem is that, during a CT scan I had at the hospital, they found a large cyst on one of my ovaries. So that’s a whole new problem I need to look into next month when I’m back in Pittsburgh for a check-up. So far, from bloodwork, it looks like it’s not cancerous but we’re going to need to look into it further to double check or to find out what it is.

Other than all of that drama, I’m getting my life back on track. I’m ready to get back to work. Ready to find myself a significant other and probably most importantly, I’m ready to take on a million new adventures with my new life 🙂