Another Bump In The Road

I'm going to just copy and paste the email I sent out last night since we are rather busy around here but I wanted to update and let everyone know what was going on. We still haven't heard from his nurse in regards to scheduling his biopsy. Chris and I talked about it last night and we are willing to go down at any time. We would prefer it to happen right now so we know what's going on and we're not in suspense. We both are very hopeful about everything. I turned to Chris last night and said, "Why don't we pray that when they go in and take the sample they don't find any antibodies at all anymore. We can pray them away!" So that's what I'm praying for. Here's the email from yesterday:

As much as I don't want to be writing this I am. We got a call today from the doctors in Palo Alto that Joaquin is going to need a biopsy. They performed a donor specific antibody test (just a blood draw) that shows he's got them which means that if they are not already attacking his kidney, they will. They do not know if he is have a case of rejection yet, the biopsy will let us know. We don't have a date scheduled yet but it will hopefully be in the next couple weeks.

The courses of treatments are relatively simple. If it's showing he is not having any form of rejection, we would his current dose of cellcept. If he is mildly rejecting then we would give him an intravenous IVG which would wipe out the antibodies and if it's worse than that there is another medication they would give him. This is not acute rejection which means he will most likely not need steroids, just meds to wipe out the antibodies.

I feel peaceful about it. I feel like we will at the most need an IVG - which is not bad. In order to do a biopsy he will need to go under general anesthesia and they will pluck a small sample of his kidney. It's not something that requires him to be hospitalized overnight. If everything goes as plan we will need to go in to do the biopsy and then he'll be released. Please send us positive results and overall kidney healthiness. All of your prayers and those you've contacted to pray for us have worked. I'll let you all know when we know more. I'll update the blog. You can pass this message along to anyone you wish. In fact, we would appreciate it.

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Joaquin is doing really good. He's acting healthy and he's eating and playing so we take that as a good sign as well. But at the same time if he has this donor antibody thing going on it's a slow way to kill the kidney, it's not something as obvious as acute rejection which would be fever and pain or tenderness over the sight of the kidney. That's why it's so important to get in there and figure out exactly what's happening. We've been looking forward to getting down there but since we got the call last night we are even more anxious. It couldn't come fast enough.

Here's wishing you all a great New Years Eve!