Grateful For Home....

 It's been a long week. Babygirl is still potentially contagious for another 4 days, so we are in home quarantine.

Babygirl is stable. She's done dialysis three times at the local center. She needs to arrive at 5:15 AM and stays 4 hours.  I can take her in and go to work in my office a couple of blocks away, but she needs transportation home. We are working on getting Medicaid to cover that, as we have one functioning vehicle right now.  Monday, with the snow, there was no ride home to be had, so she walked to my office, and I fit a quick run home in between patients.  Snowstorms tend to decrease the number of patients we see, so it wasn't a problem. Wednesday and Friday she got Uber rides for about $10 each.  That is clearly not sustainable on her budget, so I hope the paperwork for free rides goes through soon.

Dialysis is going pretty well. She struggles with ongoing nausea and other unpleasant GI symptoms. Dialysis makes people feel very cold, as they remove your blood, clean it, and put it back in several degrees cooler than body temperature, so the patient has to re-warm their own blood, as it were.

There is some excellent news, though.  Babygirl was extremely gratified to learn that the dialysis chairs resemble movie-theater recliners and are HEATED.  She's allowed to bring in a blanket, so we've used my sister-in-law's thoughtful Amazon Gift Card Christmas gift to order an electric throw blanket and some more comfortable scoop-neck t-shirts and zip hoodies. These will allow easier access to her port, with less chilly clothing shifts. She already owns an impressive collection of fuzzy socks.

Curlygirl continues her own struggle with some severe long-Covid symptoms.  I pulled an all-nighter with her in the ED yesterday, arriving home at 4 AM, which was the time I had to get up YESTERDAY to get her sister to dialysis. I fit a full day of work in between. I am too damned old for 24-hour shifts.

A few people have asked me how I'm doing.  My answer? I'm fragile. It doesn't take much to make me cry. I've advised people not to be too nice to me, as that triggers some breakdown in my control LOL. Sobbing at work is slightly less bad than crying in front of whichever kid is suffering at the moment, but not as good as crying in the car or the shower. 

This TV commercial nailed it: SickKidsVsMomStrong

DeeDee

PS: To answer the two current questions: No, the kidney is not expected to recover. We sacrificed the potential for recovery of the kidney to prevent her death by Covid. So, although Covid did not directly damage the kidney, it was ALL the nails in the coffin. 

No, she isn't on a list. We haven't even managed to schedule a hospital follow up visit with the transplant team yet.