If you are here, you are wondering what is going on with Judith and her current odyssey, the PTE (pulmonary thromboendarterectomy). Let me first address where she has been, in regard to her illness, and then where she is going.
I will warn you. I am horrible with dates. Don't hold me to any that I use in this forum (or any other). They will be approximate at best, wildly inaccurate at worst, and sometimes I am just flat making things up...
Judith was diagnosed with kidney failure in 1996. It was not long after the birth of our second child. It's called IgA nephropathy.
She went through peritoneal dialysis and hemodialysis, and finally received a kidney transplant in November of 2001. She did quite well with the transplant until October of 2007 when the IgA got the new kidney. She started hemodialysis again in November of 2007, almost 6 years to the day from her transplant.
In hemodialysis, three primary methods are used to gain access to the blood: an intravenous catheter, an arteriovenous (AV) fistula, or a synthetic graft. Judith has had them all, many times over. The result of this, we suspect, is that tiny clots have been thrown into her lungs over the years. The result of that is chronic thromboembolic pulmonary hypertension. The treatment is a pulmonary thromboendarterectomy (PTE). What it means is this. She can breathe, but it doesn't do her any good. There is no blood flow to her right lung. We're talking about the blood that goes in and gets rid of CO2 and picks up Oxygen, not the blood that keeps the lung alive. The result is that she has to be on Oxygen, coughs constantly, has little or no energy, and all that on top of the normal drag of kidney failure. Durring the PTE she will also undergo a bit of heart surgery. They will remove a calcified substance from her heart and do a valve replacement while they're in there.
To get this all done, we have to make a little trip to San Diego. That's where you go when you have this condition and want to get all fixed up. They want us to come see them on January the 26th. There will be a week of tests and then surgery on the 2nd of February. We should be leaving San Diego around the 14th of February. I intend to post updates and more history of her illness here as things progress. That's all for now.
Kam