Post Transplant Day 12 – May 10, 2024: Last Night in Hospital?

Zayne had her final IVIG infusion (4 hours long), and we will be going home on Saturday, if her kidney levels are reasonable. Her incision still hurts quite a bit, but the pain is helped with oxycodone. We walked to the hospital pharmacy and picked up another couple of medications. We are going home with 10 prescriptions. With time, most of them should go away. If her heart loosens up and she can stop using blood pressure medication, she should be down to only 3 ongoing prescriptions after 6 months. The risk of rejection is highest right after transplant, but this doesn’t mean rejection is out of the picture. Zayne went into rejection with her last heart after nearly 5 years.

I’ve been required to have discharge appointments with various departments. I think there is only one left that will occur just before we are let loose. I hope we can go home on Saturday! We’ll have 2 transplant clinic appointments each week for the first 3 months that include early morning blood draws. Since Zayne still has a little bit of fluid around her lungs, she will also continue to have X-rays.

An order of oatmeal had a piece of plastic wrap in it – discovered while I was eating and wondered what I was chewing on. This was after eating eggs that had a surprise and unwelcome taste of bacon for one bite. I showed the nurses, and soon after received a new oatmeal order with a note “please make sure there’s no plastic in the oatmeal”. Zayne stopped eating most hospital food a while ago and threw away the new bowl of oatmeal.

Zayne has impressed the medical staff with how quickly she has recovered and progressed. Her heart transplant and following open heart surgeries all took place last week. No one thought she would be discharged the week after her complications following the transplant surgery.

Zayne needs to rebuild muscle and get back to her previous weight. She will be on sternum restrictions for a while (no bikes, horses, scooter, etc). But, we go places that we couldn’t go to before since we aren’t required to be available 24×7 on the phone.