Tomorrow, Thursday:
7:30 am – I am having an echo of my heart
8:00 – Adahlia has an abdominal ultrasound to check her kidneys.
9:00 – 3 pm – IV and likely blood transfusion for Adahlia
Friday, I have labs and repeat EKG from last week and a cardio consult. (Another glorious afternoon in a hospital!) Adahlia will likely spend the day recovering from her transfusion.
The good news is that I feel better. My left arm still throbs, but mostly in the lung and pericardium channel, not the heart itself. The heart fluttering and pounding has greatly diminished. The pain is less. The sensation of squeezing or tightness in the chest is still there, but less intense.
Kidney pains come and go, ebb and flow. Mostly, though, they are less than they were on Monday, too. I work consciously at breathing into them.
The surgeon called today, wanting to cheerlead me into sticking with the plan to have surgery to drain my right kidney next Friday, under mild sedation, or even just under Vicodin, if my heart turns out to be a legit concern and anesthesia is too risky. She also said that the CT showed no left hydronephrosis, so that changes the differential diagnosis considerably, and that the situation is not nearly as serious as she made it out to be after the last ultrasound. She said that they think I have a vessel crossing in front of my right ureter – they couldn’t see it, but if its there, they think pregnancy caused it to put pressure on my ureter, causing swelling of my right kidney, and that it didn’t go down after delivery because the pressure kept the ureter swollen. Her plan remains to drain the kidney, place a stent to keep it open, remove the stent after a month, and then all my problems should be over (unless I get pregnant again, and then I should probably have surgery to move the vessel behind the ureter.)
It’s a great theory but it doesn’t explain why the right, severe hydronephrosis that had me in the ER suddenly dropped to mild status 3 weeks later, on its own, and then increased to severe again in april, or now, moderate-severe. Nor does it explain the milder fluctuation hydro (now absent) on the left.
The Chinese medical explanation (which isn’t very Chinese actually) is that a subclinical infection was triggered during pregnancy, came out of latency, began to wreck havoc in my kidneys and triggered inflammation processes, which created a sort of auto-immune situation as my body struggled to fight it.
The problem with this theory, of course, is that my urine remains clear and I am not showing clinical signs of autoimmune disease.
Yet it is possible, actually, that both theories are right, in that I may have a structural problem that didn’t become a problem until pregnancy, and it created conditions for a subclinical pathogen to grow in my kidneys, wrecking havoc in both my kidneys and now also my heart, as the organs are closely connected as part of a shared conformation.
While neither theory may be perfect, I favor the Chinese medicine explanation because it offers an explanation for all my symptoms as well as Adahlia’s, tying them together, and offers treatment that doesn’t involve surgery or drugs with serious side effects, where the other model sees each of our cases and even aspects of our individual cases as discrete and confounding issues that require rather invasive intervention.
I wish the two models talked together better, because my well intended surgeon is clearly concerned that the herbs Ive been taking for the kidneys are causing the heart issues, when I believe it is quite possible that the herbs are rooting out a toxin from my system, and that the formula simply needed some more balancing, nourishing herbs to support the heart. Besides, from the Chinese medicine perspective, my heart wasnt exactly strong going into pregnancy to begin with, and even western medicine had documented what they determined to be a benign sinus arrhythmia.
The surgeon also said that her concern is that in western medicine they understand which herbs are cardio toxic, and that herbal toxicity is not fully identified in Chinese medicine, and I’m not entirely sure that’s an accurate statement. The toxicity (and relative safety) of herbs is pretty well understood by experienced practitioners.
But, time will tell.
The great news is that Adahlia was reevaluated and doesn’t need to take the Qing Dai herb as part of her formula anymore, which means she’s subtly improving, that there’s less pathogen or toxin in her body than before. She’s been sleeping more and wanted to be held all day today, cried easily, but her color wasn’t the worst it’s ever been, and she was lively enough to play a little bit.
Anyway, its a big next few days for us. The countdowns have begun. Big decisions and bold moves must be made. Morale is higher than it was yesterday; I am not nearly as fatigued or in as much pain. And we’re still praying for divine assistance, trusting that we are being led through something extraordinary.
Oh wait. But of course we are:
Life!