What a week this has been!

Today is September 10. In under a month, we will be married 2 years. It's been hard on us, there have been times where we didn't think we would make it this far. But here we are, no matter the path that got us here.

I am home in Pennsylvania. Rick traveled to Kansas City on Wednesday to prepare for his father's funeral. His father passed away Tuesday of last week. He was 65. He had suffered from diabetes, kidney failure, heart failure and had lost his leg a couple of months ago due to infection.

Thursday, Rick began to shiver and got cold. He had another spell Thursday night and again on Friday morning. When another one started, they called 911. Rick was rushed to Truman Lakewood in Missouri. He had a fever of 103.6. They also found a puss pocket in the wound on the bottom of his foot (this wound has been there since March). They treated the fever, drained the pocket, and admitted him to a room.

3 weeks before, on August 15, we had had blood work done with our Nephrologist. While things were great, we were seeing some improvement. We were told that we should prepaid ourselves for a kidney transplant and dialysis in about 5 years. Okay, 5 years, I can handle that. My husband will be 45 when he will need to go through this. But we will get through it. One number we have been watching is the creatine. With this blood work, it was 3.6, ideally should be .2. So yes, elevated, but not horrible.

Friday, at the ER, the blood work came back, and his creatine was 7. I was in shock. How did we double in 3 weeks?!?!? They talked about emergency dialysis. Wait, what? Dialysis? I thought I had 5 years before I had to go through this and he had to go through this. Saturday morning, more blood work was done, his creatine had gone up to 8. It was getting worse.

He was transferred from Truman Lakewood to Truman Medical Center where they had a Nephrologist and where they were able to do the dialysis. I wasn't too happy at this point as our doctor had not been notified yet. So I called the Nephrologist on call that works with our doctor. With his direct information, the doctor with Rick called him. The on call doctor called me back and said yes, it was needed to save his life. Save his life? Things can't possibly be that bad. Later, the doctor at TMC said that we could give it a few hours and wait until tomorrow's bood work to see where his numbers were to make the best decision. Hoping they would improve, they said that a 6 or below would be good enough for him to be discharged, come home, and get right up to our doctor.

Sunday morning, sure enough, the creatine was at 6!!!! Wonderful news. He was set to be discharged Monday at noon.

I went back to work today with excitement (I had been off since my father-in-law passed away). Feeling so sure, I told my friends that Rick was getting better. Then at 11am I went to break and turned my phone on. I had a message from my mom that said Rick's creatine was 9.5. I held on to the counter as I started to cry.

They said that with it like this, Rick would not even make the flight home. How scary to hear that! They understood how important it was to my husband to be at his father's funeral this evening, that they actually made an exception and allowed him to leave the hospital for a few hours to spend the time with his family and honor his father. But he was to be right back to start dialysis. It was imperative he come right back.

Tonight or tomorrow starts our first dialysis treatment, and I can't be there. We are both very scared but we believe that our God will get us through this.