I finally have a date for my final transplant stuff (meeting with the anesthesiologists, more blood work, etc), which is the 13th of September. The next day I’m presented to the transplant board to see if I’m a good candidate and if so added to the active donor list. It should have been done this month. I spent the summer seeing specialists for a few hiccups I had in tests that might have made me ineligible for the transplant. They all came back just fine thankfully. However, I’ve been having some pain along my lymph nodes under my ear and running high fevers off and on. After being tested for Covid about a dozen times, Monday my doctor decided she wanted to get a CAT of that area of my neck to get an idea of what was going on. So after dialysis my husband drove me over Cincinnati way to go in through the ER so I could get a quicker test than scheduling locally. That was the thought process in play at any rate.

We walked into a packed ER waiting room. Just to be fair (considering the news reports) these were not wall to wall potential Covid patients. It was a typical ER waiting room: There were sick people, injured people, hypochondriacs, some obvious drug seekers, and a few like me who should have been going through an out patient process but instead got directed to ER. It took two hours just to make it to the triage room for starting vitals. It was about five hours in when we started talking to a couple across from us who were appalled to hear our current wait time when a woman passing by asked us. To be rather honest I was pretty meh about it. Wait times are pretty much the other name for an ER. I was only having problems with the fact that I’d come right from dialysis so I was very cold and needing to eat, both post treatment issues for me. After they threw a warm blanket over me and I downed some Starbucks sweet coffee and got some caffeine in me to trick my system a little, I was better. The battle is simply keeping my blood pressure up.

The long and short of it, after getting there at 3pm we made it to a room around 10pm, and after all my tests (new ones added onto the CAT I was only there for) we finally got to go home around 1am. Fun! Thankfully my lymph nodes were mostly okay but I did have a bacterial infection. So that tacked on a few weeks of antibiotics to clear that up. But hey, I have a date. Because I need a full liver and kidney my donor will sadly be deceased. That bothers me a great deal, but I have a lot of people doing their best to point out that even though someone is losing their life at least they’re leaving a part of them behind to help someone else with their life.