Thursday, April 7, 2011

My Kidneys are Assholes in Disguise

I knew I shouldn't have posted that blog about my kidneys. As it turns out, they have gotten worse... or so my doctor would have me think. See here's the thing. He says my urine protein/creatinine ration went up from 3.1 to 3.7. This is bad... but I can't help but feel like it's not accurate. For two reasons:

1) My doctor always says my urine creatinine is way too high for my body mass. We don't know why this is, but my thought is what if it normalized? If it came down but my protein didn't, it would skew the ratio.

2) I didn't complete the test. They gave me a smaller bottle and I filled it with 4 hours left to go, so I missed my morning pee. You'd think that this wouldn't affect the ratio, but what it my last pee didn't have much protein. Or had extra creatinine. I just feel like it's not completely valid.

My doctor does, but I don't, so I've asked if I could do another test very shortly. Also because I don't understand this ratio, but I do understand total protein, which we definitely didn't get, so I'd like to know what it is. 

For some reason they didn't send him the blood results, so I don't know my blood creatinine. If it's still around 1 I won't freak out too much. By itself, losing urinary protein doesn't really do much. The problem is when it's reabsorbed by your kidneys and they get damaged. But if my blood creatinine is staying the same, that's a good sign. And as I mentioned previously, it was close to 1 in December, and has never been over 1.25, so hopefully it's still under that mark.

This shouldn't affect my IVF (unless somehow my creatinine completely shot up which I pray it didn't). My only concern is that the prednisone last time kept my protein lower, but when I got off of it, the protein went up quickly. How will they differentiate when I'm pregnant between my kidneys doing what they do and going up in protein, and an issue due to the pregnancy? My blood pressure is likely to go up too, just because.. that's what kidneys do. How will they tell? I guess frequent liver tests? I mean 300mg is huge in someone without kidney problems, but I have 6000mg on the regular.  300 is a drop in the bucket, and statistically insignificant for me. I'm fully expecting to be on bed rest, potentially hospital bed rest, for part of this pregnancy. And that sucks, but it is worth it to have a baby. With creatinine under 1.4 I should be fine. I just don't want them to think I'm having an issue with pre-eclampsia or something when it's a kidney thing. I guess I should probably worry more about getting pregnant right now than something that might not even be an issue. I'm hoping to get to 30 weeks without issue, and if I have to lay in bed for the next 8 that's fine by me so long as my baby and I end up healthy. 

Hubs says this is the year of the baby. I hope it's a perfect, normal pregnancy. We'll see what happens. My first appointment for baseline ultrasound and bloodwork is Wednesday! YAY! And I start injections next Saturday. I can't believe it's finally here!! Hooray for babies. 

One thing I find extra cool about the idea of snow babies is that say I do need a transplant in the next few years, but we want another baby and I'm.. I dunno, 36 (it's OK to have babies after transplant if you wait a year or two). I'd have snow babies from when I was 30 to use, so I wouldn't have to freak out over egg quality decline or anything, so that's a cool positive about this IVF cycle. I hope and pray it doesn't come to that. That I'll be miraculously healed, or simply not get worse. But it's still cool to know it's an option. I'm excited for this upcoming cycle, and I just can't wait to get it all started. 

No comments:

Post a Comment