Your Three Months are Up, Back to the Clinic!

It's been three months so I went back to Dallas Transplant bright and early for my periodic check-up.

In the interim I had my annual physical exam with my primary care physician a couple of months ago and assume everything went OK. As usual, they asked if I wanted to access my results online. As usual I screwed it up. As usual the time window expired before I got the information. If it had been dire, they would have called me. I hope.

I seem to be a little more tired these days, ankle swelling seems a little worse, my feet hurt more and I put on some stubborn pounds over vacation. (Well, what's vacation for, anyway???) Extra pounds explain all ills. I didn't expect to find many changes.

And there were no drastic changes. Hemoglobin, Blood Sugar, Calcium, Phosphorus, Blood Pressure, Protein, Sodium; all these measure and more were normal and unchanged. What's missing? OOPS. Creatinine. Up to 3.6 from 3.1. The PAC (who has seen me many times) didn't show concern today. Let's hope the creatinine is not up again when I go back at the end of November.

What causes change in creatinine? After all, it is a measure of kidney function. As before (see 'Surviving PKD: It's not a Rejection, but...), it could be rejection, it could be BK Virus, it could be degradation of the little kidney due to the previous BK inflammation.

It's been a year since the BK serum level was checked, so it's time to do a BK test again. The test has been prescribed. It is done at Baylor Hospital's Outpatient Lab. One of these mornings, probably next week, I'll get that done. I'll post the results as soon as I have them. (Family Warning: It might not be until my next appointment!)

The other test I need is a colonoscopy. (Did I say NEED???) Well, it's been five years and I did have a couple of small polyps, it's definitely the thing to do. I'll need to get that scheduled, probably in mid to late September or October.

I can't remember if I talked about my last colonoscopy in a blog post. It was done in October 2007 as part of my transplant evaluation, just before my last polycystic kidney was removed. At the time the kidney was the size of a basketball and its size distorted the normally straight lines of the colon. I can painfully attest to the great difficulty Dr. H. had forcing and manipulating the scope through the distorted canal. He apologized after the procedure and said that if he had known it was going to be so difficult, he would have put me under anesthesia. At that point I think he just gave me another valium. That puts an interesting wrinkle into the next procedure.

I'll let you know in the next post.