January 5, 2008

I stayed at the hospital last night to make sure there were no complications from the biopsy and Sabine's BP problems. Thankfully, she had a fairly good night because they finally got her blood pressure somewhat under control. (Low 140s/low 70s). The renal doc came in this morning and was happy, as we were, that there were no complications yesterday or last night.

We sense tension between our health coop and the kidney specialists about how long Sabine should be in the hospital (welcome to our crazy healthcare system!) The kidney guys understandably say they want to keep her until they find out what's really going on. They remind us that Sabine has only 10% of her normal kidney function. Then I remind our docs from our coop that I don't particularly like to have to make ER runs in the early hours because Sabine's high BP drives nauseating headaches.

So the good news is that the biopsy went well and the labs will take a couple of days to process the tissue specimens and Sabine is sitting up and feeling a little better. Dr Chan, the kidney specialist, is convinced that her problem is one of two things and both will respond to steroid treatment (prednisone) which she will begin today.

The bad news is that her creatinine level indicating kidney failure remains high (6.2) and rose a bit from yesterday. There is fear that this indicates some permanent damage to the kidneys. And Sabine needs to continue her hydration via an IV; she needs about 5 liters of water a day to make sure she does not get dehydrated which will further complicate the kidney problem and it is difficult to drink that much water orally each day. The other bad news is that she is now getting a skin rash reaction possibly because of one of her blood pressure medications which were working (metoprolol or clonadine).

As of noon today, I plan on conducting services at St Peter's tomorrow, The Feast of the Epiphany (at 7:30 and 9:30) and then return to the hospital.

Stay tuned. Keep your prayers coming and thanks for all your concern and offers of help (including two kidney offers!).