Saturday, November 14, 2009

Curiouser and Curiouser

Much like Alice, I find myself puzzled these days. Alice's strange experience was her travel through Wonderland. For me, it's the liver transplant journey. It's been confusing for both of us.

A quick recap - Two months ago, my labs showed very elevated liver enzymes. Last month they dropped a bit, but were still in the 400s and 500s - far over the high end of the normal range, which is 40. Then a couple of weeks ago I noticed a symptom that I hadn't had before, even prior to my transplant - the color of my stool was light yellowish-gray, an indication that there are bile problems. I had labs repeated and the results continued to be abnormal, so yesterday I had a liver biopsy.

In the past, I would have asked my doctor and liver coordinator a series of contingency questions: "What if the fibrosis is worse? Would you want to A, B or C?" or "If the fibrosis stage hasn't changed, would you need to run more tests to determine why things are out of range?" Finally, almost three years after my transplant, I realize that it's useless to try to predict what's going to happen until the results have been reviewed by my doctor and her colleagues. Too many variables are at play and we could spend hours trying to anticipate what will happen.

So once again we wait and by the end of next week, we should have news and a gameplan. In the meantime, I'll be spending a little time online searching for information about what these symptoms might mean. It's going to be an interesting week, to be certain.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The waiting is never fun. We are having the same kind of week. My husband had a liver transplant 17 months ago. Other than a rejection episode a year ago, his liver is doing great. But now he is having other problems. He is having severe pain that seems to originate with the colon. We are waiting for an appt. with his old gastroenterologist to find out what is going on. Our fear, of course, is cancer. It is hard to concentrate on anything and hard to think beyond the current crisis. So....I have an idea what you are going through. Hang in there!

Linda - Wichita, KS