Before and After

I was thinking just today after looking at some pictures of Joaquin that now our lives will be defined by "before and after" transplant. I look at pictures of him when he was a wee babe and think how he had a dialysis catheter in his side and each night we hooked him up to his dialysis machine and that was our lives. Sometimes I feel like I didn't get to fully enjoy Joaquin's babyhood because it wasn't as simple as just being a baby for him - or for us. I know that soon I will be looking back on that time of when he was on dialysis and think, how did we do that for a year?! I guess we just did it.

The past few days have only consisted of walking over to the day hospital at around nine in the morning for blood draws and that's all. We have clinic appointments every Monday and Thursday and those will take up a little more of our time but we are basically done with all of that by noon. Today I was even feeling bored. But I thought to myself, better to be bored than to be stressed, right? I think I over-exerted myself yesterday and so I'm just trying to rest up today. Since I've been feeling better I've been wanting to get out and do things. We usually just walk somewhere like downtown Palo Alto or Menlo Park. Yesterday we walked to Menlo Park, which is a good distance from the Ronald McDonald House and by the time we started walking back I was feeling a little tired. Sometimes I forget that I had major surgery and my body is still healing.

Joaquin has been playing outside in the little red car - which he loves. He's been eating more and more and we think that the two teeth next to his top two front teeth are starting to come in. He's also getting a little too sassy for his own good - but that fine cause I know that when he's sassy he's feeling good. Another two words that he's been trying out are: ball and door.

So as you can tell, things are pretty uneventful as of lately and that's just fine with us. I'm not sure how much longer we will have to continue on with the daily blood draws. What they are mainly monitoring with those blood draws are his creatinine levels and his Prograf levels. They ideally want to see the Prograf level between 10 and 12. I would like to know when they expect that to clear up because on our release forms from the hospital it said that we could expect daily blood draws for the first 2-3 weeks post-transplant and I know that hospital people never like to be generous with their estimations. They'd rather tell you the time to expect and then double that time. Joaquin's Prograf levels are still fluctuating, as to be expected, but we've been told that they're not fluctuating as much as other babies. So we'll see...