Fevers and Kidneys.........

I'm writing this on Sunday morning while Sony sleeps through a light fever and delirium.

So......the plan was to do two sessions of dialysis within a 12 hour period (usually not allowed) beginning on Friday night and continuing at 4am on Sat.; that all went just fine, but then yesterday late morning Sonja started to spike a fever again. This one wasn't as severe as the monster she had three or four days ago, but it pushed her heart rate up higher and her blood pressure as well. Not a dangerous situation, but always a little scary when her heart rate jumps and more than that, it just makes her uncomfortable and cranky (of course, I should really say "more" uncomfortable. Lying on one's back for weeks in a hospital, having someone wake you up every 2 hours to take your vitals is nobody's idea of comfort).

On rounds this morning, however, both the nephrologist (Dr. Leibman, the kidney specialist) and Dr. Kaufman, the head of the ICU, were thrilled with the amount of urine her body has increasingly produced, apparently a great indicator of the kidneys willingness to re-assume their workload. As to the fever, it is very unlikely she'd continue to show kidney improvement if there was any new infection, and the fever itself can be reflective of several other possible causes, from dialysis stress to the antibiotics themselves. It should run it's course and she'll be ok again, and her vitals will again reflect that.

Welcome to our world......life down the rabbit hole, where bad news is actually good news, unless of course it turns out not to be.

So the really weird thing is that you sometimes find yourself feeling relief and anger at the same time; relief that the news has turned out to be good or at least better than you thought, and at the same time feeling this inchoate frustration with circumstances that you don't understand in the first place and that seem capable of changing and shifting from moment to moment, in their own time and at their own rate.

Those of you who know me know that I don't think much of organized religion (to be kind); I have for some time practiced as a kind of agnostic Buddhist for that reason, a practice based on simple principles of right behaviour rather than dogma and stained glass windows. And finding oneself in this situation is a, oh, hell I don't know, a great example of practicing "not-knowing"; you can't control this whole thing, you can only do what you can do today, and try to stay open to what today actually presents, good and bad.

That is a way of praying I think, or maybe prayer in action. But certainly the whole notion of prayer, raised as I was in a strictly devout New York Irish Catholic family, is something that has now changed for me. I've learned viscerally the multitudinous ways in which prayer can be present in the room, and that's been a great source of comfort and learning.

And now back into the room is exactly where I'm headed.....more to come.

-- Paul