No extra credit on these tests
“Life is just a slow march towards death.”
-Marley
Got my blood test results today from the PCP. Overall, I guess the results are nothing to complain about. My creatinine went up slightly to 3.06 from 2.97 at the end of December, which itself was up from 2.84 a couple weeks before that. I don't know what the sensitivity for these sort of tests really is so it's hard to tell just how significant an increase all of this is. If it's a true increase rather than statistical noise, I can start to project just how long I have until the kidneys fail completely. At this rate it would average out to around a .1 increase per month and I would have around 15 months until GFR hits 15. Honestly, it'll probably take a few more months of test results to get any idea of the actual trendline but there's still some hope that maybe I can toe this line for a while longer.
My current calculated GFR is 24, which is basically an estimate of the percent of kidney function I have left. I had dipped to as low as 17 at one point back in October, so I guess I should feel happy for the reprieve but it's down from that high of 30 in mid december. 15 is the point where some people start having to go on dialysis. For most, it depends upon how sensitive you are to the poisons that begin to accumulate in your blood. There are all sorts of side effects that start cropping up after a while. Other people try to hold out as long as they can without dialysis but when you get down into the mid single digits, death from uremia starts to loom.
While the rest of my blood test results were generally positive....hemoglobin was around 11, meaning I'm only mildly anemic, total cholesteral was in the 150's though the LDL was a bit high, A1C is still 5.6 so I'm just on this side of normal for diabetes rather than borderline, etc I did get one new crappy surprise. Because this kidney thing is the gift that keeps on giving, my uric acid numbers are way up. Normally, people have elevated uric acid numbers when they consume a lot of meat, especially organ meat. It's what ends up leading to gout, a painful condition were uric acid crystals form in the tissue and I hear it sucks. Well, it looks like uric acid is another thing that my kidneys are no longer doing the job in getting rid of. It also seems that it's one of those things that diet is unlikely to fix. All of the drugs that you would normally use to treat an elevated uric acid level are the same ones that would end up doing more harm to the kidneys so once again, I'm in in the fun position of being screwed coming and going. I guess there aren't any problems yet, but it's nice to know that I'll probably have untreatable gout to look forward to in my future.
Sometimes I really don't get the point of all of this. All of this scrambling about to try to stick one more finger in the dike, to keep ahead of the rising water which will just drown you in the end anyway. Why even bother? In the end, we all fall down....
-Marley
Got my blood test results today from the PCP. Overall, I guess the results are nothing to complain about. My creatinine went up slightly to 3.06 from 2.97 at the end of December, which itself was up from 2.84 a couple weeks before that. I don't know what the sensitivity for these sort of tests really is so it's hard to tell just how significant an increase all of this is. If it's a true increase rather than statistical noise, I can start to project just how long I have until the kidneys fail completely. At this rate it would average out to around a .1 increase per month and I would have around 15 months until GFR hits 15. Honestly, it'll probably take a few more months of test results to get any idea of the actual trendline but there's still some hope that maybe I can toe this line for a while longer.
My current calculated GFR is 24, which is basically an estimate of the percent of kidney function I have left. I had dipped to as low as 17 at one point back in October, so I guess I should feel happy for the reprieve but it's down from that high of 30 in mid december. 15 is the point where some people start having to go on dialysis. For most, it depends upon how sensitive you are to the poisons that begin to accumulate in your blood. There are all sorts of side effects that start cropping up after a while. Other people try to hold out as long as they can without dialysis but when you get down into the mid single digits, death from uremia starts to loom.
While the rest of my blood test results were generally positive....hemoglobin was around 11, meaning I'm only mildly anemic, total cholesteral was in the 150's though the LDL was a bit high, A1C is still 5.6 so I'm just on this side of normal for diabetes rather than borderline, etc I did get one new crappy surprise. Because this kidney thing is the gift that keeps on giving, my uric acid numbers are way up. Normally, people have elevated uric acid numbers when they consume a lot of meat, especially organ meat. It's what ends up leading to gout, a painful condition were uric acid crystals form in the tissue and I hear it sucks. Well, it looks like uric acid is another thing that my kidneys are no longer doing the job in getting rid of. It also seems that it's one of those things that diet is unlikely to fix. All of the drugs that you would normally use to treat an elevated uric acid level are the same ones that would end up doing more harm to the kidneys so once again, I'm in in the fun position of being screwed coming and going. I guess there aren't any problems yet, but it's nice to know that I'll probably have untreatable gout to look forward to in my future.
Sometimes I really don't get the point of all of this. All of this scrambling about to try to stick one more finger in the dike, to keep ahead of the rising water which will just drown you in the end anyway. Why even bother? In the end, we all fall down....