Mark's Our Boy: Happy World Kidney Day!

Wow 4 months post transplant. Good news...Things are good!
We have been busy...Spending some serious time home after transplant and avoiding germs was our first task at home. When January came it was time to head back to school. This was exciting but scary at the same time. Scary because this winter has been full of germs. Off Mark went to school. I think he made it a full 3 days before we ended up in the hospital. We were there for 4 or 5 days. The morning he woke up with a fever I knew we were in trouble. I packed a bag and headed to Boston. For some reason I had hope that they were just going to send us home..not so much! Mark's white blood cell count was dangerously low. With the combination of the low blood cell count and the fever we were not going home. After a couple days we went home with a new medication added to the list. We would have to start a daily injection to keep the white blood cell count up. When I say "we" I should say Chris and Mark. I'm way to much of a wimp to do his injection. My job is to clean the site and hold Mark's hand. Thank goodness for Chris!

CHB Jan 2012

We were released Friday night from the hospital! Just in time for the big surprise we had coming for Mark on Saturday morning. This was his post transplant gift...finally!!

New puppy! Welcome to the family Opie.

And a couple more...

Mark seems to have taken to his new puppy pretty well. I was a bit nervous about the commitment, but have no regrets now!

We have graduated to less follow up appointments now. We started 2 times a week post transplant for about 8 weeks, then to once a week for 10 weeks and now we are at 2 times monthly as of this week! hopefully by the end of May we will be on a once a month visit!

His recovery is going well Mark has grown almost 5 centimeters and gained 3 kilos...The doctors say he looks great!

I feel like now it's just getting him back into the school routine. I think Mark and I are still in a bit of a fog. Life changed overnight for us and then was almost back to "normal" overnight as well. Once the New Year was here Mark was back to school and I went from 2 to 4 days working again. It may not sound like much but it is. I don't think I ever really absorbed all that had gone on, until after the dust had settled. Now I am working on not feeling so lost, and maybe find myself again.

Couple photo's from the past couple months....