Monday 10 November 2014

A rolling stone gathers no moss


I didn't anticipate doing a blog today, but have had an interesting development.

Seems this is it.

I spoke to my donor team contact this morning and they informed me that everything with the donor is fine. The next step is to arrange a final date for the operation itself and we've been given a selection of dates to choose from in February.
We now need to talk to my donor and decide which date suits us most. This is the major advantage to having a living donor...it's completely in our hands.
Once we've decided on the date, we contact the team for confirmation, wait, then 2 or 3 weeks before the operation, I have the final physical to make sure everything's still ok for the op.

Then we do this.

How do I feel?

Um....

See what I did here? I'm sluggish but also shocked...so....Turtle.

Well....after writing the first bit of this entry...I sat for about 5 minutes just staring at my hands, wondering how I really feel. Staring at my hands because they were at that moment my tool for conveying how I feel, and I couldn't use them for a moment because I wasn't sure how to use them for optimal explanation. Does that even make any sense?
Honestly, I'm not sure. The closest I can put it to is the following:

Have you ever spent months, possibly years planning something, going through bumps and obstacles and working working working away, knowing at the end of it something pretty huge is going to happen and you feel yourself thinking about it every minute of every day?

Then you wonder how you'll feel when it's....done?....Over?.....

That. What you get during that is what I'm feeling. But 10 fold.

What I do know is, I may have to leave some of the planning to Tom as I've so many thoughts and considerations swirling around in my head, I'm struggling to put 2 and 2 together when it comes to the operation itself. Of course, I'll have input, but at the moment I can't think straight. This being the case, at moments I'm actually finding it a touch difficult to talk coherently. This tends to happen when I've too many thoughts to process. I struggle to find the right words or put together an understandable sentence. Main reason being, all thoughts want to come out of my face at the same time. Basically, I develop a stammer. Unless I've got the words written down in front of me.
I try and control this by stopping....taking a moment to think....then talking slowly and carefully. But it's difficult when the person/people you're talking to aren't used to dealing with you like that. So then I sit in silence.

Also - having originally believed my tremors and muscle spasms/twitches were down to side effects, I've realised there's another cause for them. One of the issues I have is my system doesn't absorb as much sodium as a healthy human body. As I'm on blood pressure tablets to control my levels, I'm ok to keep eating more salt whereas people are normally meant to control how much salt they have as too much can increase blood pressure.
Fluoxetine actually further reduces how much salt the human body takes in, which causes a build up in the muscles and therefore causes the tremors and involuntary twitches I've been encountering.
After seeing my specialist on Friday, I kind of put two and two together and realised this isn't a side effect that will pass on its own, but means I need to increase my sodium intake.
Yes, my doctor has actually informed me if I get a craving for anything like crisps or Chinese.....it's ok because it's medicinal. I make a point of going for the most home made based crisp packets I can find (oil, potato, salt), but it does mean I can grab a packet, look at Tom and go 'what? It's for my health' and it's true lol.

So yeah....should be an interesting next couple of months.

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