A super nice girl named Sarah calls me, its kind of funny with the time difference b/c when she called she was still sitting in her office and I was in the motions of getting my daughter to bed...
We went over what I sent her, everything checked out fine, then to step two.
The transplant team needed my blood in California so they could see if it would matched up with Clint's blood. I get this bigger packet in Fedx, in a giant plastic bag with 8 glass tubes to put my blood in packed in styerfoam boxes. I took the packet and a letter with instructions that the coordinator had written to the lab by the little hospital in my town. Took about 10 minutes, they got my blood in those tubes (it was dark like grape juice, very strange I thought) and I put it back in that Fedx package to go back overnight to California.
The nurse coordinator called one week later to tell me we were a match.
Next comes step 3: Lab & Diagnostic Testing...
1.) Blood samples to screen for medical diseases, hepatitis, etc...
2.) Blood & urine samples to see normal kidney function
3.) Electrocardiogram (EKG)
4.) Chest X-Ray
5.) Exercise stress test
6.) Echocardiogram
This does seem like a lot and there are still more tests to follow these (I'll get to those later). They are so very thourough, they even go as far a psychosocial and financial evaluation. They want to make sure that everything about you is well & secure enough to give.
These two links are to videos that discuss the reason's why a live donor is so great, personal stories of people who have had transplants, etc. They are each about 10 minutes long or so...
www.ucsfhealth.org/media/living_kidney_donor.swf
Hi honey.... this is such a great idea! Now I can stalk you! :-) Monika
ReplyDelete