My Deja Vu

It is difficult for me to remember a holiday season in my life when I have felt 100% healthy. Maybe it was the anticipation of a living room full of presents, but when I was a kid, I was sick every Christmas day without fail. Flash forward to Christmas 1995. I was deathly ill, sleeping up to 20 hours per day, throwing up anything and everything I ate and being treated for a "stomach ulcer." Three days later, I was diagnosed with end stage kidney disease and had begun preparing for a lifetime of coping with a chronic illness. Two more years go by and the dialysis wasn't working as well as it once had. Pictures from that Christmas show one very tired, pale and puffy young Dawn. Two days later came the call I had been longing for: a kidney was available with my name on it. Less than 12 hours later, I had a brand spanking new functioning kidney.

It should have come as no surprise, then, when I awoke this past Christmas morning feeling like a pile of poop. My stomach was in knots, I had absolutely no appetite and barely enough energy to haul my butt out of bed. This time I was convinced the culprit was medicine related and did not signal impending doom. The week before, I had received a call from my new BFF, Denise, who told me that while my hemoglobin came up to a whopping 8.6, my iron had dropped nearly in half. Not good. As a result, Dr. Cool Whip had prescribed an iron supplement to attempt to bring it up some. Iron is notoriously difficult to take, so when I started feeling horrible, I was quick to speak up and request to stop the medicine. After a week of being iron-free, however, I wasn't feeling any better and panic started setting in. I was worried that the kidney had bit the big one, so I had Dr. Cool Whip run some tests. The good news was it wasn't the kidney. It looks as though it is holding strong and my levels have been stable since June. The bad new was, we still weren't sure what was causing me to feel sick. We finally settled on a virus of some sort and went with the old "wait and see" course of action. It seems like we were right because for the past week, I have been feeling a little better each day.

Unfortunately, though, I am still not taking the iron, and without iron, the Epogen injections will not work as well. Not that the Epogen had been doing much to begin with. In the four months I have been taking it, the most it has done has been keeping my hemoglobin steady which would be awesome if my hemoglobin had started out at say, 12.6 rather than 8.6. So, I am finally getting a higher dose of Epogen. In fact, they are more than doubling it...from 40 mcgs to 100! I will eventually have to start back up with the iron, as well, but probably at a lower dose. For now, we're just going to see how the new dose of Epogen works out. My first shot with the new dosage will be this week, and I couldn't be more excited!!