And the clouds keep rolling on in

"Well I barely woke this morning on the cold ground by the sea.
And I opened up my eyes and those black clouds are all I see.
And I wonder if someone's up there,
If the black clouds can see me,
And the clouds keep rolling on in..."

I watched the JC Chandor and Robert Redford movie All is Lost the other day, and yeah, couldn't help but commisserate with Redford's challenges throughout. Every day a triumph followed by disaster. No matter how clever or how tough, luck is luck and the world will do to you what it wants.

Not unlike this increasingly ridiculous transplant process.

My blood clot in my liver is mostly gone, which is nice, but I might be dealing with the start of the fabled graft-vs-host rejection issues. I don't hate the idea because it can lead to a better fight against the lymphoma, but as one doc put it they can't turn off the switch, so there are too many risks. We'll keep an eye on that.

My steroids right now are my biggest beef because they're doing decidedly un-steroidly things like making me weak and tired. They also appear to have given me a hopefully temporary diabetes requiring insulin and all. I miss the steroid that made me a strong like a horse.

On the other hand my ice cream maker is doing some good things and Brooke just made short ribs. And the world is a far, far better place with short ribs in front of you.

Day 65

Seems I'm apologizing a lot these days for infrequent posts, but my health's been a bit of a mixed bag and it's sometimes tough to work up the energy to make one of these posts.

I'm still a bit preoccupied mentally with what I went through with my kidneys and liver in the last 30 days. The organs are all on the mend now, but it took me a while to grasp just how close to death I was. Just a day or two, really, of things continuing as they were and I would've been gone. Going into this process I prepared myself for that reality, but this was different. I wasn't conscious. I wasn't aware. My liver stopped working and I was sliding away, and I came awfully close to just leaving and not knowing it. That's not easy to take.

Thankfully I'm back home and trying to get back to normal. I've been left with almost 20 excess kilos of fluid in my belly that we're trying to get rid of, so now I just look like a fat vampire.

Oddly enough, the new immune system seems to be doing great and I've had no problems there, which is a nice bit of luck. The whole liver and kidneys thing just turned out to be bad luck. The head of the transplant program said in 23 years I was the first guy to ever go through that. Once again I'm a medical curiosity. Never a good thing.