Where Did I Go? Now You Know!

The last few years have been hard, but good. I have become a husband, a college graduate, a professional, a dad, and nearly dead. About eight months after the last post I was married to my best friend. Almost three years after that I became a dad. Shortly after she was born I found out my large intestine was becoming cancerous. My little girl is a year and a half old now and we are getting to know each other better. For most of her life I had been severally ill. About a year ago my transplanted liver failed, this time more harshly than the last.

In a span of a less than a month I went from hiking mountains and working full time to being hospitalized for five weeks. My abdominal cavity filled with fluid and what it couldn't hold flowed to my leg tissues swelling them to the point that fluid seeped out of my pores. When it could no longer inflate my legs, the fluid traveled up. It started to fill the tissue sacks that surrounded my lungs, my left lung especially.

In the months leading up to my second transplant I had multiple procedures where they would insert a giant needle into my abdomen and drain the fluid. During one of fluid draining appointments they emptied out nearly five and a half liters. The amount of fluid they drained from my body was astounding. In reality the fluid was the only thing giving me any weight while the rest of my body wasted away.

The sickness made me exhausted but I couldn't sleep. I stayed up all night watching re-runs of shows that I never understood as a child that now as an adult I could relate to immensely. Well maybe not 3rd Rock from the Sun, but honestly who can relate to that - it did make me laugh though.

I was also in extreme pain and was put on ridiculous amounts of narcotics, opiates, and over the counter pain-relievers. I could barley move from the pain, then after the meds I could barely move from the side-effects. The pills made me sleepier than before, but I still couldn't sleep. The pain-killers did make 3rd Rock a lot more interesting, and believable though, not that that is a good thing though.

On a side-note, kids, don't do drugs, they are horrible, horrible, addictive things, use pain-killers sparingly. You will thank me later when you need them and three ibuprofen will knock you out. I did myself a terrible disservice being on large doses of medicine for long periods of time causing my body to build a tolerance to it. You are better off dealing with small amounts of pain so when the big pain comes you have a solution.

I lost insane amounts of weight. If you subtracted the fluid weight at my lightest point I weighed around eighty-five to ninety pounds. Which when compared to my weight fluctuation since the last blog post in 2009 it is mind blowing. I went from 130 to 220 after being put on huge doses of steroids in 2010, then dropped most of the weight, 90 pounds, by Christmas of 2011. I thought gaining ninety pounds was rough on the body, losing forty pounds when you are already underweight is ten times more tolling on the body.

Eight months after my initial hospitalization I started having excruciating abdominal pain in the middle of the night. I started throwing up and couldn't stop. After nearly an hour I couldn't take it anymore and started yelling. Aleece came running downstairs to find me writhing in pain. She called 911, found a baby-sitter in minutes, and when the ambulance never showed she drove me across the Salt Lake valley to the hospital. The drive usually took nearly an hour, That night we drove across the valley and I was checked in to the ER in  twenty-eight minutes. We had the hazards on the whole way and even passed several police officers

It turned out that I had a perforated bowel and the doctors had to decide if they were going to take me right then and there. They decided to wait. They waited, and waited. I ended up not eating for over fifty-four hours. When I was finally able to eat again I was given a Saltine cracker. I have never cried over food before, but at that point I lost it. I had never been so hungry in all of my life.

The next few days I went down-hill rapidly. I could feel my body shutting down and my time growing short. A lot of the time I didn't want to go to sleep for fear that I wouldn't wake up. Several days after being put in the hospital I ended up on the top of the transplant list. I was on the top, but nothing came. The hours felt like days and the days felt like eternity.

Finally on March 26th, 2014 I had my second liver transplant. This time going into the surgery though I also signed a consent that if my large intestine needed to come out they could do that as well. I agreed. When I woke up I had a new liver, and no colon. It was really weird adjusting to it but it defiantly has improved my quality of life.

My recover was relatively quick, but there was no time to rest. A few months after my transplant we moved from Salt Lake City to Rossford, Ohio. It has been quite the change and has been pretty weird living with my in-laws. It won't be long before we get our on place. Until then, I will be working, parenting, husbanding, and now, more frequently, writing.

Sorry it's been awhile,

Damen