The new, new normal
Don't get your hopes up, don't let your guard down.
-Unknown
Got a call from the nephrologist a little bit ago. It seems the potassium has gone up a couple tenths of a point to 5.6 or 5.7 and she wants to try a new medication to try to bring it down. The far worse news is that the creatinine has also shot up. 2 months ago the reading was 3.09 and had been looking relatively stable. I had been hoping that it would stay that way and I could count on a slow rise of .1 every few months. The reading this time around was 3.3 which means that it's now advancing at 3 times the rate it had been previously. I guess there's no way to tell for sure if this will stay constant, but I don't think it's a good sign to be breaking new ground in these sort of numbers.I guess if I really think about it, it was probably foolish to have let myself be lulled into a sense of normalcy. There's still a chance, abeit a small one, that this test was some sort of outlier. I think that's generally unlikely though.
It also throws my hopeful timetable of 3 years out the window. The name of the game has always been stall and delay, hoping to put off kidney failure for as long as possible. Even then the previous calculation was unlikely to beat the average wait time of 5-7 years, but at least it moved things into the realm of possibility. The new current estimate would be around 12 months before kidney function drops enough to push me into kidney failure, less than 15% kidney function remaining. That's not a good milestone to pass, but it won't be until kidney function drops to around 6% that the poisons will accumulate to a point they become toxic. I can't seem to find any information about whether kidney function decline is linear or if it increases exponentially as less function remains. I might be putting my eggs into a basket with a hole in the bottom.
In the end, there's nothing to be done about it. What will be, will be.