After more than a year of HD, my chest x-ray revealed heart enlargement (cardiomegaly) most likely due to exerting too much pressure to push around 2.8 liters of blood into the machine for cleansing. The echocardiogram showed mild regurgitation in three of my heart valves.
I was prescribed to take an anticoagulant even before I started my HD. Heparin, also a coagulant, was often injected during HD but through time, my platelets significantly decreased. In March this year, flushing of saline solution was done every hour to avoid blood clotting and clogging the bloodline and dialyzer.
For one month, I experienced swelling due to fluid retention. I had to undergo HD three times a week to remove excess fluids then onward, the volume used for flushing was added to the total volume of blood for HD.
Because of these problems, I started to pray for a kidney transplant and a donor in June 2022. During our weekly online prayer meeting, I also requested our newly designated church Pastor to pray for it. When the plan was discussed with my family, my daughter immediately volunteered to be my donor. I said I would wait for her to finish her Ph.D. degree as a scholar in the US in December 2024. However, my vascular surgeon, the one who did my AV fistula, advised me to go for it while I was still stable and strong. Hence, I planned to enlist myself in the deceased organ donor program of NKTI-HOPE. Whichever comes first would be alright, I thought. When I went home after my initial consultation and discussed it with my family, my son said he would be my donor. What a blessing to have the full support of my family!
My donor and I started our workups on December 19, 2022. We were supposed to do the crossmatching, blood typing, and tissue typing first before we proceeded to the other lab tests but I firmly believed that we were matched and advised my donor son to do the other required tests to maximize our stay at NKTI. Yes, we are matched and then resumed the other tests in the second half of January. My son got cleared first but I was delayed for one month because of my UTI. Yes, there were delays but we believed that these happened to ensure that I am fit to undergo the transplant surgery and my donor son is fit to donate his kidney. Finally, we both got cleared by the first week of April and then applied for the Z package of PhilHealth. Our operation was rescheduled for another week because of some issues with its approval. We finally got the approval on the scheduled date of my hospital admission.
The worst HD experience happened in my last session before KT. My machine malfunctioned during the last hour of my session before the scheduled flushing was done. I had to transfer to another device. This resulted in a blood clot that clogged the bloodline and the dialyzer. The nurse tried to manually return the blood that just entered the bloodline but it was already clotted. Poor me! I lost so much blood and even worse, my AV fistula failed to bruit the following morning. Oh no! 🙏
📷 Google Image
