MUST BE GETTING STRONGER
Mood:  quizzical
Now Playing: "Is That All There Is?" (by Peggy Lee)
Topic: Family
That which doesn't kill us makes us stronger The trouble is you don't always know the difference. The past month has been the most difficult days for determining direction I have experienced to date.


First there was the aforementioned phone call from son-Bill telling me of his head-on crash that totaled his truck and somehow defied the laws of physics and total him. (See the Rolly Polly Face Blog below.) Bill is back to work at the office rather than with the computer on his lap in his living room. He's still struggling through the terrible headaches and remaining injuries from the crash, but he's getting on with life, stronger, in a new truck. (See his blog about that)



So just about the time I was finding some equilibrium sans Librium over the thought of Bill being way too far away in Georgia, I saw my Nephrologist and was hit, OK slammed, with the news he was going to be sending me to the Dialysis unit over at the hospital in the next couple of months. WHAT? My labs changed all THAT MUCH since I saw him last back in the winter when he had said I had nothing to worry about until they got much worse. What was he talking about? Well, OK I was closer to the edge than I might have been otherwise, and I just went back into that now-familiar state of shock I'd just so recently left.



I suppose I should say here that I had talked with another doctor in town a few years ago, and had pretty much bought into that discussion of dialysis as being no quality of life to settle for. Well, I'm not feeling anywhere close to being dead presently, so I found myself in what could truly be called a quandary.



When I got around to breathing calmly and thinking somewhat rationally again I started Googling and Yahoogrouping until I found some answers. Although way too much is written about keeping a positive attitude and way too little about the task analysis of what dialysis is all about, a good man on the yahoo ESRD list went to the trouble of posting a real-life video that set my mind at ease. It doesn't look fun, but it most certainly looks very doable. So at peace with that change of philosophy, I got back to my doctor and he threw the book at me the lab test book that is. So I'm now getting numbers to quantify everything we could possibly think of, and he'll take those back to the Nephrologist and find out what's really up or down as the case may be. That all came about this past Monday afternoon. And so on I go, getting stronger and stronger as my kidneys get weaker and weaker.