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Turpitude
Oct 13, 2004

Love love love

be an organ donor
Soiled Meat
Hey Goons! My name is James and I used to have a pretty crazy thread here, back in 2013 when I was trying to get my second double lung transplant. Things went downhill quickly and pretty soon you had my wife posting on my behalf as I lay near death in a hospital bed in the ICU. I ended up being in the hospital for 7 months, 4 of which were spent in the ICU, 96 days of which I spent on the ECMO artificial lung device. Remember me? Here's the old thread, not sure if you need archives for it: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3507641&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=1

Would you like to go back even further? In 2006 I was terrified of my future; I thought I would never even make it to transplant, and I posted a thread in GBS about it. Believe it or not, GBS reacted with universal kindness and understanding and may be responsible for helping me get to this point. This one is definitely in the archives: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=1853014

My wife, who saved my life, kept a blog going the whole time that a lot of people followed: http://breathtoblog.blogspot.ca/ we are still updating it to this day, though not as often. Lots of really good recent pictures of us on there!

It's been 20 months or something since my second double lung transplant, which was on May 29th, 2013, and things are going very well! I'm home in Victoria, working on staying healthier than ever,

Weird stuff that happened during my journey that you should totally ask about :

-Extremely fast decline
-Living across from the hospital and having to get an ambulance to get me across the snowy street
-Getting put on ECMO on my birthday; being on ECMO for months longer than expected
-"Overdosing" on dilaudid and verset
-Tubes in my rear end, tubes down my nose, tracheotomy and tube in my neck
-Half conscious, slowly bleeding out of an artery while a surgical guy tries to plug the hole with his finger
-Completely insane hallucinations that I felt at the time were "prophecies"
-Memory loss
-PTSD

Cool stuff that happened/is happening post transplant:

-Donald Trump Gave Us $40 000 US (well, he gave it to my wife; I was laying half dead in the ICU)
-Free personal training
-Articles and radio interview
-Getting audited and losing out on disability related benefits from being too healthy
-Giving a Q&A at the Canadian Cardiovascular Congress in Vancouver
-Giving a 30 minute speech in front of ~300 people at a Cystic Fibrosis fundraiser
-Gardening, hiking some of the west coast trail
-Trying to get my wife pregnant

The other thing I am extremely happy about and looking forward to is that I am going to be taking a class on how to write a memoir from my old university, UVIC, which I had to drop out of due to my illness. I have always wanted to go back and get back into writing; I also want to turn my story into something I can possibly make a bit of money off of, but more importantly spread to the rest of the world to create more awareness and most importantly more organ donors!

I love you goons so much. You guys have actually contributed to keeping me alive. Here are two of my favorite pictures from 2014, from a visit to Vancouver Island's West Coast Trail, my favorite place in the world and somewhere I dreamed about constantly during my illness:


Turpitude fucked around with this message at 01:17 on Jan 12, 2015

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Turpitude
Oct 13, 2004

Love love love

be an organ donor
Soiled Meat

Amara posted:

I haven't read your previous threads, but OP this is awesome. Glad to see you made it somehow intact through 4 ICU months.

I'd love to hear about your ecmo. Were you awake during it? Did they have you doing PT? How was the drive to breathe handled?

What happened to the first transplanted set of lungs?

Please also relate the finger in artery story.

To answer your questions out of order, my first set of transplanted lungs were awesome for the first year I had them. I gained a ton of weight and started riding bikes with my fiance, worked out at the gym all the time, and enjoyed food for possibly the first time in my life. Not having slime-filled CF lungs was a revelation--I didn't spend hours in the morning coughing anymore! and eventually we were able to get married. I danced the night away with my wife, feeling super good. The next morning my lung function was down by 35%; we were in disbelief and got new batteries. No dice. Assumed it was a blip from drinking and dancing the night before. Continued to watch it fall over the next few weeks while communicating back and forth with my transplant team; we had been planning on flying back to Victoria, BC, and the transplant team hesitantly told us it would be alright for me to go back. There were a few other factors: I also had a sinus polyp which was blocking my nose from breathing, so we assumed it had something to do with the problem and had already planned to have it removed in Victoria when we got home.

In the end, it turned out to be a condition called Bronchiolitis Obliterans Syndrome and it is mysterious and deadly. I had the worst form of it which meant my lungs were being destroyed at a rapid pace. The transplant clinic in BC told me I would need to return to Toronto for another transplant assessment.

ECMO ended up saving my life. I was awake and oriented on it and was indeed up and doing physiotherapy every day! I was ventilated and the docs here still consider ECMO to be an extremely fragile state, unlike in the UK where they have been having people awake and walking on ECMO for decades. Here is a little video we made that shows me in motion both before and after transplant!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBZc5u190yI

Finger in artery story:

It was night in the ICU and I had a stitch come loose at the ECMO site where it plugs into the artery in my right shoulder. Think of a tube the size of a small hose being jammed into your flesh, then stitched into your artery. So while I'm laying in the ICU trying to stay alive like a fish out of water, drifting in and out of hallucinations and dreams and whatnot, the nurses keep trying to stop the blood pouring out of me with various compresses and tape and such. They are not allowed to mess with ECMO stuff because that is highly specialized equipment, so they were trying to stop the bleeding in their own way. I spend hours drifting in and out of consciousness, being woken intermittently by the feeling of blood dripping down my arm, calling the nurses, getting them to try to fix it. At some point they call in a surgical fellow to see if he can deal with it, and the guy decides he can solve the problem by plugging his gloved finger into the hole and holding it there, standing there awkwardly looking down at me while I half-consciously writhe about in the bed because it fuckin' hurts to have a finger jammed in an open wound.

I don't know how long he was standing there like a doofus for, but what ended up happening was my wife walking into the room early in the morning to see a bunch of nurses trying hard to hide their concern, setting up a blood transfusion for me because I am super low on blood, and a surgical fellow with a finger in my shoulder. Having a bit of first aid experience, my wife asks them if they have tried a steri-strip to stop the bleeding, and it was like there was an inaudible DERP facepalm kind of moment as all the hospital staff looked at each other in shock. Then they got me a steri strip, I stopped bleeding, and with the help of the transfusion I pinked up again.

Turpitude fucked around with this message at 04:06 on Jan 12, 2015

Turpitude
Oct 13, 2004

Love love love

be an organ donor
Soiled Meat

Cemetry Gator posted:

When I saw the thread title, I remember the old thread, and am instantly happy to see that you're doing well.

So, what does your healthcare routine look like now that you have had a falling out with death and decided to move far away from that fucker's house?

My healthcare consists of taking a lot of pills and getting lots of exercise. I still have Cystic Fibrosis in all my other organs so I need enzymes to digest my food; they make up the bulk of my daily pill load. I take immunosuppressants morning and night; immuran, prograf, and prednisone. After the second tx I developed diabetes because of the high levels of prednisone, but now that I am down to a very low dose of 5mg/day, I no longer have to worry about my blood sugar but for a while there I was checking it 5 times a day. I also take a ton of vitamins.

As far as other stuff goes I get bloodwork monthly to check all my levels. They monitor closely for white blood cell levels, CMV, that sort of stuff.

Bambina posted:

Yay Turp you look fantastic, extremely pleased to see you're still alive and kicking. My first thought was 'nah that thread can't have been 2013!?' How time flies.

Hope your incredible wife gets pregnant soon, you two certainly deserve that kind of happiness after everything you've been through.

Thank you so much! We have definitely been through a lot of poo poo and deserve some sunshine in our lives.

Jeza posted:

How and why did Donald Trump give your wife $40k?

Here is the story on how this all came about :

I had to move to Toronto from Victoria BC again. I had to live close to the hospital which meant paying a lot for rent, and my wife couldn't work because she had to be my full time caregiver. My parents had already mortgaged everything they could for the expenses of living in Toronto for the first transplant. My dad had had a massive stroke so my mom needed to stay home and care for him. So we decided to fund raise online.

While fundraising on Facebook we were contacted by people from out of New York who were starting a new fundraising website called http://www.fundanything.com/ . They told us they wanted to do an interview and put us on TV to raise some funds and get some traffic to their website. They sent a camera man out who interviewed Adena and I. They also phoned me to be on live TV while the video was airing in the States.

This all amounted to nothing, as no one really donated to our campaign (I dont think their website got any traffic) and things stagnated for a while. But the producers of Fundanything kept in touch with us and a few weeks ago they told us that they would like to fly Adena to New York as part of a media event where Donald Trump would be giving us $5000, as well as donating funding to two other online fundraisers. We thought it could be a scam so we were very cautious about agreeing to this; we had to five them my social security number, etc. After a lot of hesitation, we decided it was worth it for Adena to risk being away from me for a day in order to publicize our story and raise funds for living in Toronto.

They flew her down to New York and she refused to stay for any longer than was necessary. I think she spent one night in a hotel, got cabbed to Trump Tower and watched in horror as Trump threw a bunch of cash into the crowd and whatnot, and they sprung a surprise on her: the donation was for $40 000, not $5000. I still remember getting her call while I was laying there in the ICU, where she told me she had been given 40 grand. I thought it was some more delirium and quickly fell asleep again.

Turpitude fucked around with this message at 05:55 on Jan 13, 2015

Turpitude
Oct 13, 2004

Love love love

be an organ donor
Soiled Meat

BlueGrot posted:

Holy poo poo, I've been following your old thread and thought about you as recently as last month. I figured you'd died.

I'm glad you didn't die!

Thank you, I'm glad I didn't die either!

spog posted:

Very happy to hear that you are still around.

These new lungs; what's the estimated lifespan on them? Should they keep going for a long time?

Well this is a very difficult question to answer. It haunts my wife every day. Re-transplanted lungs are still very uncommon and the data isn't great. They say the average (or median, I can't remember) survival time is 2 years, which for me is way too bleak an outlook. I think the data is skewed by all the people who die within the first 30 days of re-transplant. Right now I am extremely healthy and fit, but I was the same before my first set of donor lungs failed. So we struggle with the knowledge that our lives could become very terrible very fast. We try not to take anything for granted.

If I have my way, I will outlive my parents and pets and get to raise a child with my wife.

Engineer Lenk posted:

You have good taste in hiking trails. What part of the west coast trail did you do?

Have you and your wife done genetic counseling in preparation for trying to have a kid?

I have been doing one short section of the trail since I was a kid, from the narrows at Whyac (roughly halfway down the trail) to Clo-oose bay, which is about 1 hour's leisurely hike. We have a summer cabin there. This summer I hope to do half the trail, which should be convenient now that they have made the Nitinat narrows a starting/finishing point!

We absolutely got genetic testing done. Adena is Jewish and has a range of predilections to be aware of; I have the most common form of CF, and she was tested for all the most common forms of CF which make up about 99.5% of the CF mutations they know about.

cheese eats mouse posted:

With so many close calls with death has this affected how you view an afterlife?

HUGE SPACEKABLOOIE posted:

Seconding this, especially in relation to the hallucinations. Do you have any philosophical musings you'd care to share? Life after death, that sort of thing.

I have always been agnostic and had quite a bit of curiosity about death - I always have wondered what comes afterwords. While I was right on the knife's edge in organ failure I was having hallucinations that I truly believed were taking place in Hell. I was trapped and cold and constantly sick and vomiting in these hallucinations. There was brutal violence everywhere that I couldn't escape. I saw things that at the time I thought were extremely important "prophecies" that I couldn't shake and felt deeply troubled by in my waking hours. I have never been into Jesus but for some reason he was in one of my visions. I have thought about this stuff a lot since my close calls but I feel like it's impossible to see where the spiritual begins and the biological ends. I was in organ failure and on massive doses of sedatives to stop me from waking up in horrible pain. It's well known that the cocktail they had me on tends to give people ICU induced psychosis and PTSD, which is definitely what happened to me. But I still can't shake the power of what I saw. I guess the best I can say is that if I really did visit a form of Hell, it is not a place anyone would ever want to go. It was extremely awful and the PTSD I experience is still fairly strong, even after this much time.


Only for organ donors!

Turpitude
Oct 13, 2004

Love love love

be an organ donor
Soiled Meat

Skeesix posted:

Is there something about your condition that means you have to use IVF?

Men with Cystic Fibrosis are missing the vas deferens. It's just a weird thing that comes with the disease. In fact sometimes adult men end up diagnosed with (a mild form of) CF when they are infertile and can't figure out why.

They would normally be able to get sperm out of my balls with a little needle but I had to make it difficult by having a collapsed epididymis. Nothing is ever easy with me! The collapse was probably from having massively swollen testicles post transplant. From all the water weight I had put on my scrotum was the size of a honeydew melon! So a few months ago I had to go in to hospital to have a urologist slice open my scrotum and they took "large chunks" (my doc's words!) out of both testicles. The fertility clinic thankfully got viable sperm out of this, but there is a further complication: men with CF have sperm that has low motility. So we actually weren't able to do IVF, we had to pursue ICSI. Now we have 6 little frozen embryos in the freezer at the fertility clinic.

Maybe in a few months I will be able to let you guys know if I am gonna be a dad!

Turpitude
Oct 13, 2004

Love love love

be an organ donor
Soiled Meat

Luvcow posted:

Awesome story and thread OP, good luck on your journey. :)

Thanks!

Bum the Sad posted:

Holy poo poo Turp. You're alive. I posted like crazy in your old thread explaining medical jargon as I was a transplant/ECMO nurse(in grad school now.) So happy for you man.

Hey Bum! I always appreciated your inside information in the last thread. How are you these days? Keeping healthy? Got any cool ICU stories to share?

Beachchica posted:

What a great thread to see! So glad to hear you're doing well Turp! Welcome back to Victoria. I'm assuming you're using Dr. Hudson? We were using him for awhile as well and have our rainbow baby sleeping soundly in the next room. He's amazing and his team are so friendly and accommodating as well. Fingers crossed this next journey goes as smoothly as it can for you.

So amazing to hear that! yes, Dr Hudson and Dr Graham. May I ask how many times it took for you to have your miracle baby?

Slide Rule posted:

As a person who will most likely need a new heart in 5 years or so, your story is compelling and heart-worthy (literally). Can you tell me what your doctors did for you to prepare for the transplant, not once but twice? My cardiologist has prepared me, but I'd like to hear it from someone who actually survived major organ donor transplantation, and has approached it with candor, honor and an amazing spirit.

Are they allowed to tell you who's lungs you received? I hear it depends case-by-case. I am rooting for you!

I love me some good happy threads.

I have great news for you: heart transplants are waaaaay more successful than lung transplants! This is because the lungs are constantly in contact with the outside world. They have also been mastering heart transplants for much longer than lungs, so they have much more experience at most transplant centers. On the heart transplant list I expect your wait would most likely not be very long. You can expect to do rehab 3x/week and be in a state of constant readiness for your call. You may have to quit work and get a full time caregiver if your condition deteriorates. If you get extremely sick you could be put on bypass in hospital until your organ becomes available, and I don't see why with the current tech we have that you couldn't be on a machine indefinitely until your heart arrives. Bum the Sad would maybe know more about this; I think the main risk is bleeding out from the blood thinners.

I do not know much about either of my donors, which makes me sad. I only know that my second donor was someone who died in Hamilton, a city not far from Toronto. As a recipient I had the option of sending letters to each of my donor families, and I did. They had the option to reply but never did so.

spog posted:

Do you have the option of getting another set of lungs in the future? Could you keep 'upgrading' every 2 years forever?

(FWIW, I got a donor card because of you. I am also a lovely driver)

Super hard question to answer. I don't want to put my family through the horror of my second transplant all over again. I feel I could survive it because I have survived so much crazy poo poo that I feel kind of invincible! But as far as I know there has never ever been a third double lung recipient. I also most likely have some lasting liver and kidney damage from the last go around, so who knows if I would even be viable for another one. I am hoping to hang on until some new tech becomes available. Maybe they will figure out how to handle bronchiolitis obliterans in the next year or two? It's hard to say what the future holds. I have lead a charmed life in the respect that medical advances have arrived in time to save my rear end.

McGavin posted:

Hey OP, does your last name both start and end with an R? I think we were friends when we were little, except you went by Jamie then.

Yeah, I'm James (Jamie) Reimer, who's this?

Arnold of Soissons posted:

Is this a good idea for someone who has spent the last decade battling a genetic illness?

I'm not sure if you are under the impression that I would pass on something genetically, or if you are questioning whether it's a good idea to bring a child into the world when their father might not live very long. Genetically speaking, it's extremely unlikely any child I have with my wife would have Cystic Fibrosis. Stranger things have happened, of course.

As for the other part, it has been an extremely difficult choice, as you may imagine. My wife and I have both dreamed from an early age of raising children. One of my great drives to survive for all these years has been to raise a grandchild for my parents. After the first transplant the future was extremely bright and we expected a long, happy life together. Our dreams were quickly shattered after the wedding and we had to pick up the pieces after my second transplant. There is no doubt in my mind that we will be great parents; my wife's constant fear is that I will die and she will be left alone with an infant, or God forbid twins! She is an amazingly strong woman, though, and feels like she could handle being a single mother if I die later on.

My other thought on the matter is that if I do die I know my wife and child will be loved and cared for by a lot of people, and that there are worse things than growing up without a biological dad. I would hope my wife would snatch up some other nice nerdy goon and make him our baby's daddy.

Turpitude
Oct 13, 2004

Love love love

be an organ donor
Soiled Meat

SHISHKABOB posted:

Can you like, take a picture of all the pills you take in a day, or like a week or something.

Sure, I will do that tomorrow probably, and get around to writing some more stories.

Thanks for the kind words as always, I'm glad you guys enjoyed the old thread :)

Turpitude
Oct 13, 2004

Love love love

be an organ donor
Soiled Meat
IOU a photo of my meds still. I need to refill a prescription on Monday to make the picture more accurate!

Here are some gross pictures to appease you all in the meantime:

Staples after the first transplant:


Bipap a few months before my second transplant; I have no memory of this:


First few days in the ICU, I was intubated:


ECMO going into the artery at my shoulder. You can see here that the tube was bent, which led to the whole circuit being replaced later.


Multiple IVs, ECMO, Ventilator, and vital sign monitors:


3 out of 5 of my chest tubes, post second transplant:


My trach scar is deeper than most of the ones I have seen. You can also see a little bit of the ECMO scar on my right shoulder.

Turpitude
Oct 13, 2004

Love love love

be an organ donor
Soiled Meat

Effexxor posted:

Jesus, those pics. I'd thought Figure1 had desensitized me, but nope. Glad you survived and are doing better. Also, your cats are freaking awesome and I would enjoy more pictures of them.

I was also wondering, how isolating does it feel to have CF? I've heard that people with CF aren't really supposed to be around other people with CF due to risk of infection and man, that sounds kind of depressing. Granted, the internet and Skype probably helps a lot but still, it seems kind of sad to know that there are people that are physically dangerous to go near who are going through the same thing that you are.

My kitties ARE awesome! I missed them so much while I was in Toronto. For the first year there I kept seeing them out of the corner of my eye. Then during my second transplant I desperately wanted Xanadu with me in my hospital bed. For some reason he is the one I wanted most.

Bombay looking guilty


Xanadu posing in front of a picture of us that a friend took


Dorothy is now living with my mom on the farm because she didn't get along with my wife's cat


My wife's kitty Ophelia


It used to be extremely isolating to have CF. I was very depressed and very lonely for a long long time. I grew sickly and was unable to keep up with my peers. I pretty much missed a large part of my early 20s from spending weeks on end in the hospital over and over. The internet has been the place I have thrived since I was a teenager. The escapism is a part of it, along with social interaction, pain reduction, and keeping my mind occupied while doing a lot of breathing treatments for the old CF lungs. Since transplant things are a lot better but I still need to isolate myself from other CFers because of their chronic infections and my lack of immune system! There are great online communities for CFers and their caregivers. I got to know a lot of other CFers during the transplant process but only by proxy; my mom or wife would ask all the questions I had for them and relay them back to me on the other side of the transplant gym!

Bum the Sad posted:

Odd question Turp. Was your ecmo a ghetto rigged Centrimag, i.e. a VAD pump with an bypass oxygenator(for open heart) spliced in? Those "motors" are identical so I'm sure it was it is just funny that you survived for three months on not even a proper ECMO circuit.

Here's the centrimag Ventricular Assist Device for heart failure


Yes, it was a modified device! Apparently they are now standard of care for their mobility/because they are easy for the nurses to monitor. That's what some guys at the Canadian Cardiovascular Congress said.



mizbachevenim posted:

Is it something you encourage other CFr folk to do?

If they are going to need a transplant they should definitely get on the transplant list as soon as their lungs get in bad enough shape. But I am hoping that with new treatments there will be less of a need for transplant! I may never be able to benefit from them, but it is looking like we may have an effective treatment, at last, for the underlying issues of CF.

Turpitude
Oct 13, 2004

Love love love

be an organ donor
Soiled Meat
Sorry for my laziness updating the thread recently, I blame things being busy around here in a really good way.

To start, here's a picture of my meds.


The pill case at the bottom is a week's worth of meds separated into AM and PM. The pills scattered below it are Saturday morning's dose. I take more meds at morning than night because that is when I take the bulk of my anti rejection meds. M, W, and F are days I take antibiotics, so those are my most pill intensive days. Vitamin K ampules I mix with a drink once a week. And yes, the Flintstones gummies are my multivitamins and they are awesome. I take 4 a day, 2 morning 2 night.

The red and grey pills are digestive enzymes and I take about 30 a day/1000 a month. All the white enzyme bottles there add up to about 1000. The pharmacy bill shows the enzymes alone as costing nearly a dollar a pill, all of which is paid for by Canadian healthcare. The other meds are even more expensive.

To the right of the spilled enzymes is my spirometer, which I blow in every day to track my lung function. The number it gives me on its little digital display is my FEV1, which is "the volume exhaled during the first second of a forced expiratory maneuver started from the level of total lung capacity." In other words, I inhale as deep as I can and then blast out all the air in my lungs as quickly as possible. By recording my FEV1 every day I am able to see trends and note if the number drops. The horror of my second transplant all started when that number did a nosedive overnight. For those who are curious, these days I blow between ~3.14 and 3.50 on any given day. It's a bit of a range but never seems to fall any lower, which is great, and on days when I feel super good the numbers reflect that.

de la peche posted:

Didn't read your old thread, but good luck Turp. Hope it all works out for you. What are the chances of potential future breakthroughs RE: transplants/'prosthetics'?

Chances are huge! They are getting really good at growing artificial hearts and other organs out of patient stem cells now (gently caress YOU GEORGE BUSH) and it is only a matter of time until they create lab-grown lungs that are the perfect match for patients in dire need. I am also optimistic about the future of anti-rejection medication, better treatments for the Bronchiolitis Obliterans syndrome that wrecked me, and better machines that have their interior surfaces coated in an anti-clotting material that would allow them to circulate the blood outside the body without the risk of the patient bleeding out.

Above Our Own posted:

I imagine at times you found it difficult to conjure up the will to live. What, if anything, made the most difference?

Yes, you imagine right. My wife Adena made the biggest difference. My love for her gave me a strength and bravery that I could never have found in myself otherwise. Without her I would have been lost.

Pompous Rhombus posted:

I popped into A/T for the first time in a few years and see this thread, it's pretty drat inspiring. Keep doing you, buddy :kiddo:

FWIW I'm an organ donor (and ride motorcycles...)

Thank you for being an organ donor! Remember to make your wishes very clear to your family, because in the end the decision will be in their hands.

That goes for all organ donors; you need to have the talk with your next of kin so they don't keep you alive in a vegetative state or let your organs get cremated.

Turpitude
Oct 13, 2004

Love love love

be an organ donor
Soiled Meat

photomikey posted:

WIll you be on antibiotics forever, and... isn't that bad for you? (Obviously better for you than not having lungs, but still.)

Yes, I will be on antibiotics forever. I have already been on antibiotics pretty much forever, it's kind of the norm for kids with CF. It's not unusual for us to be prescribed them as prophylactics to fend off infections being passed around at school, day care, and for simple things like going to the dentist (though that is usually a one-off, large antibiotic dose). And then there are all the times I was in hospital for 2-weeks of IV antibiotics to deal with infection. Near the end of my original lungs' life, my bugs had grown various resistances and I had been on just about every antibiotic on the market to find stuff that works. I was, however, very fortunate to not get MRSA or VRE, which are hospital acquired infections that would have had no problem disintegrating my dying lungs.

Funny aside, I scared the docs at Toronto General and St Michael's hospitals in Toronto by culturing what they at first thought was MRSA, but was actually my very own home-grown version of Staph Aureas that WAS Methycillin Resistant, but then they had no problem wiping it out anyway; guess it wasn't as powerful as the real deal. I still had to be quarantined and everything while they figure it out, though!

For current antibiotics I am on Sulfatrim and Azithromycin, both of which are typical for lung transplant patients. The Sulfa is for preventing a type of bacterial pneumonia that can invade lungs when you have no immune system. Azithromycin is commonly prescribed long term for both CF and Transplant patients because it has anti-inflammatory properties that help the lungs. There may be other reasons but I am not familiar with them. I have been on both of these antibiotics off and on for at least 15 years.

There are definitely dangers associated with long term antibiotic use, not least of which is destruction of the good gut bacteria, which may have had a role in causing my massive nausea attacks. CF patients also often have damaged livers and kidneys as a result of antibiotic use combined with the progression of the disease. When I was in the ICU a lot of the painkillers actually stopped working for me because my liver had been subjected to so much medication over the years that it has turned into some kind of Terminator! My palliative care doctor said something along the lines of my CF liver laughing at everything they threw its way.

AirCav58 posted:

Do you sleep with a bipap?

Nope, just my wife and a cat!

I was only on bipap for a few days while I was dying, before they switched to the hardcore cyborgware to keep me alive, and I have no memory whatsoever of those days. Probably a blessing because I was apparently acutely uncomfortable and terrified.

Turpitude
Oct 13, 2004

Love love love

be an organ donor
Soiled Meat

Anya posted:

It's so wonderful to see that you are still alive and kicking, Turp. I followed your last thread with great intensity and am very happy that you've made a third which focuses on your recovery.

Looking at your regimen of pills - how does having that much medication hamper traveling or a social life? I just wonder about trying to cross the border with a small pharmacy in your carry on.

Thanks for letting us in your family's life :)

Yeah hauling around a backpack filling amount of medication is inconvenient. I bring it as a carry-on when flying back and forth from Toronto. I have yet to cross any borders with it and don't plan on visiting the states any time soon, so we will deal with that silliness when it comes!

Fluffy Bunnies posted:

I went scanning through A/T and saw the word "lung" and literally went "TURP'S ALIVE? YAY!".

So hey dude, you're "that lung guy in A/T" in my brain I guess :3:

What's the hospital food you hate the most at this point?

Oh man, by the time I was ready to leave that place there was barely anything I could stand to eat. The worst of the worst is the pureed stuff that looked and smelt so much like my barf I couldn't go near it. I'd slam the lid down over the plate and carry the tray to outside my door and close it. I used to rely on outside food for my nutrition because the hospital food was 80% garbage.

Octarine Dream posted:

I lurked the previous threads so I figured I might as well come forward and say I really enjoy reading your stories and am glad you're alive. I also became an organ donor because of you and talked to my family about my wishes.

Thank you!

Kuiperdolin posted:

Do your new lungs feel physically "different"? Like you can tell they're not the ones you had?

This might be a bit personal but do you think about the donor a lot? That he's partly within you or something like that?

The new lungs definitely feel different. Not a big change from when I had my first set of transplanted lungs, but my CF lungs were absolute nightmares. They drained my energy and made me feel sick constantly. I forgot what it was like to live life without a chronic cough.

I do think about my donors all the time. I wonder a lot about them and their families. I hope that everyone took some solace in the fact that their dead relative was able to save at least one life and hopefully more with their organs. I consider donors and their families to be heroes. Soon my wife and I are going to write two more letters to my two donor families and update them on how well I'm doing, and maybe we will get a reply this time.

corded ware culture posted:

i don't post much but i've been following your posts since the last thread and i'm glad to see you in better health and spirits. i've shared this thread with my sister who is going through a liver transplant and your story was inspiring to her, as i'm sure it is for many others. keep on keeping on, man.

Thanks! I hope your sister's transplant is a huge success. Have you checked to see if you could give her a bit of your own liver?

Beep Street posted:

Did you thank Donald Trump?

Do you have any dietary restrictions? Can you ever drink alcohol?

What would happen if you were to smoke a cigarette right now? Do you think smokers are complete idiots?

I didn't personally thank Donald Trump, but we have thrown around the idea of sending him a card. He's not my kinda guy but I remain grateful to him for helping us out.

The main dietary restriction I have is avoidance of grapefruit. For some reason there are chemicals in grapefruit that cause immunosuppressant medication to stop working, which would lead to the body rejecting the organ. Other than that I am able to eat pretty much everything, and I am less picky now that I have less food aversions from all the nausea poo poo I was dealing with. For a few years my menu was down to almost nothing because I kept throwing stuff up.

It is not recommended but I do drink a little now and again. I love a dark beer or glass of wine with dinner or just before bed. If I drink more than one or two drinks though I feel like poo poo in the morning, no doubt partially because of the antibiotics I am on. Alcohol is also expensive so I only get it every few weeks.

My lungs are probably better right now than a lot of nicotine addicts, so I expect I could smoke a cigarette just fine, though i would hate it and it would make my lungs spasm because it always does. As for my opinion of smokers, I could rant for days. They disgust me, anger me, depress me, randomly piss me off. Toronto was rife with smokers walking down every street and blowing smoke in my face as I shambled along dragging my oxygen tank. When the snow melted in Toronto, a million disgusting styrofoam cigarette butts would thaw on every street because 99% of nicotine addicts are also litterers. Weird how everyone else has no problem putting their gumwrappers and coffee cups in the omnipresent trashbins, but smokers feel obliged to be shitheels. They also form knotted walls of cigarette smoke in the entrances to buildings and then get offended if someone on oxygen asks them to obey the signage that says smokers have to stay X metres away.

I hate every person who drives and smokes with a kid in the car or smokes in their home with a kid. I hate people who drag their third hand smoke stench everywhere with them in public, spreading it into my pristine lungs that I worked loving hard for. I stared death in the face and now I have to deal with these self obsessed assholes asking if they can bum a cigarette and a light when I am walking down the street.

My final word will be that smokers are loving idiots destroying themselves for no reason, and I would happily take the years of their lives they are throwing away.

Turpitude
Oct 13, 2004

Love love love

be an organ donor
Soiled Meat

Beep Street posted:

I'm not american so was only aware of him as some rich rear end in a top hat that gets mentioned in American Psycho a lot. I'm sure a letter on how well you're doing now would be nice for him to get though.

My 20 year old cousin has CF and smokes weed daily. You probably didn't want to know that. He is on some awesome new(ish) drugs which mean his lungs will probably never be as poo poo as your original ones but I'm sure it's probably still a very very bad idea.

Weed is nowhere near as bad as tobacco for a billion reasons I shouldn't need to get into. But you should buy your cousin a nice portable vape so that he can enjoy that fabulous plant with minimal lung harm. And get him a nice pot cookbook too while you are at it. Marijuana and its derivatives are the only things that ever made me enjoy food as a teenager/young adult with CF. I still take a medication, daily, that is synthetic THC to boost my appetite.

I have met a lot of people with bad lungs and it was always caused by one or more of these things:

-smoking cigarettes for decades
-losing the genetic lottery like me, or developing pulmonary hypertension or having a hosed up heart that kills the lungs
-getting cancer and having chemotherapy destroy your lungs, causing you to need a transplant
-working with, and inhaling asbestos particles (I met a lot of sweet old guys who needed transplants for this. most didn't make it)

No one ever needs a lung transplant for marijuana related reasons. Pot smokers also do it in private, don't drop litter all over the loving street or out their car windows, and don't throw an entitled hissy fit if a pregnant woman, asthmatic, or transplant recipient asks them to back off.

Beep Street posted:

New question - you mentioned relating to Songs in A&E by Spiritualized (my favourite band, you have good taste) - are there any other songs/albums/bands that helped you through? Did you listen to much music when you were in hospital or were you too hosed up to concentrate on anything?

Music is one of the forces that keeps me living. I am always searching for new music to bask in. My life is constantly soundtracked and when I have been in hospital I have always had my music with me. While I was doing the workup for my first transplant, Arcade Fire's "Funeral" had just started getting hype online. I saw some goon mention it and ended up listening to it in the hospital while riding on an exercise bike in my room and fell in love with every moment. Their words were and have remained an inspiration and I can pretty much thank that band for saving my life.

After the first transplant I was giddy and wild with emotions and insisted on cranking Meat Loaf's first "Bat Out of Hell" so I could belt "Paradise By The Dashboard Lights" out at Adena. The doctors standing in the hallway were extremely amused when they came in near the end of the song and told me it sounded like I was ready to get out of there! We also both found a lot of parallels in the song "Adventures in Solitude" by The New Pornographers, another Canadian band I love. The song is about how no one else knows what someone has gone through to survive after a hard experience away from their friends. It even mentions survivors guilt, which I have had to deal with after both transplants.

During this last transplant I listened to a lot of Arcade Fire again, this time it was "The Suburbs" and I loved it dearly, but now I have a lot of hosed up memories and bad feelings attached to it, making listening to it an unpredictable experience. Pretty weird that such an amazing album triggers my PTSD, but it featured strongly in many hallucinations. My wife also played some of her favorite albums to soothe both myself and her during the endless succession of long, long days in the ICU. I can't listen to this one song at all without feeling like I am having a panic attack.

Other artists who contributed to my survival... mashup artists like The Kleptones and Girl Talk and LUDACHRIST and The White Panda got me through some rough times with their wit and pop culture shenanigans. Morcheeba, Belle and Sebastian, Nick Cave, St Vincent, PJ Harvey, David Byrne... the list could go on for a while. I also listened to Tricky's "Evolution Revolution Love" over and over because I couldn't get it out of my head post tx, and Fembot by Robyn because I liked to sing it with Adena.

Turpitude
Oct 13, 2004

Love love love

be an organ donor
Soiled Meat
I had CF Clinic yesterday and there were zero issues with me. The best part of the easy clinic day was that I was prescribed some new mega vitamins that I only have to take 2 of a day, which will replace about 8 of my other vitamins. For example it has 6000 IU of Vitamin D, a ridiculous amount.

I also handed in my first "memoir essay" in memoir writing class which focuses on PTSD and the trauma of going through what my wife and I did. Where can I upload it for people to read?

Turpitude
Oct 13, 2004

Love love love

be an organ donor
Soiled Meat

KARMA! posted:

medium.com is probably the least effort way.

Thanks!

https://medium.com/@jreimer23/first-memoir-assignment-274d738f1ea2

So this isn't complete and my ultimate goal is to turn my story into a manuscript and get it published. My memoir writing class is nothing too serious, this first assignment will be commented on by my 14 classmates and professor (all of whom are much older than me, I'm the baby of the class) and I will receive their feedback then. If any of you want to give any feedback or ask me any questions about what I wrote here, that would be pretty awesome!

Turpitude
Oct 13, 2004

Love love love

be an organ donor
Soiled Meat

Parahexavoctal posted:

So, aside from the vas deferens thing, and the low sperm motility (and of course the whole issue with your lungs), are there any other symptoms to CF that people might not know about?

Can you be a blood donor?

Asbestos dust is crazy, scary stuff.

Women with CF can also have reproductive issues related to mucous buildup clogging their moving parts, but I don't know much about it. I know of several ladirs with CF who conceived with no difficulties.

Diabetes is one a lot of people don't know about, I used to hear that it was 50/50 whether I would make it through adolescence without developing diabetes. It's a type of diabetes called CFRD, Cystic Fibrosis Related Diabetes, which is caused by our pancreases being gunked up. I didn't develop it until my time in the ICU and after the second transplant. I don't have it anymore because my organs recovered and my Prednisone dose dropped! But CFRD is interesting because unlike other diabetes patients, we are told to continue eating our high calorie high carb fat salt sugar diet that we stick to to gain weight, and just counter it with as much insulin as we need on a sliding scale.

Dr.Caligari posted:

If you don't want to, please don't, but could you tell us about yourr hallucinations? Have you ever had what you might consider a near death experience? I totally understand if you don't want to speak on it. So alternatively, could we hear the OD'ing on Dilaudid story? Thanks, glad to hear you are doing well

I'm happy to talk about my hallucinations because it feels a bit like therapy. They were definitely tied in with being in a near-death state. When I had the worst of these hallucinations I was very, very close to never waking up. I'll start with the Dilaudid thing:

Early in my time in the ICU I was on Dilaudid to relieve my symptoms of breathlessness. My dose kept climbing and climbing until my palliative care doctor told me I was on enough to wipe out everyone in the ICU. At around this point they started noticing my liver was going toxic, so they switched me, cold turkey I think, to Versed, which caused my first horrifying hallucination.

I was laying in the hospital bed looking at my wife, who was sitting at the foot of the bed saying something to me. A nurse we really liked was nearby in the room, moving toward me I think. And then time froze and began repeating one second or so of time over and over in an infinite loop. I was trapped in this single moment of my wife in mid sentence and the nurse moving towards me. I couldn't escape it and couldn't will myself to do or say anything, I was completely paralyzed. I willed myself to talk and scream for help but nothing happened. I tried to move my arms and strike myself on the head but couldn't move them. Then suddenly I snapped back to real time and was being held down and restrained by the nurse and my wife. The nurse was repeating over and over to me, "I know what's wrong! We can fix it!" to pull me out of my terror.

What they had seen: I had suddenly starter thrashing and slamming my fists into my head and saying that time was repeating itself and please hem me I can't get out. I was in great danger of ripping my lines out or thrashing out of the bed so they had to jump on me. I don't remember exactly when this happened in the time line, but I think it was before I was put on ECMO, which is pretty lucky. If I had flipped out and wrenched my arms around on ECMO I could have bled out.

The other hallucination I feel like writing about right now is the one where I was convinced an ICU nurse was an evil entity and was out to get me. I was awake and hallucinating all night (possibly due to Haldol and a bunch of other hardcore meds in my body). It was after my transplant when I was very, very near death. In this hallucination I was laying in a gurney that had some sort of automated motor that was causing it to rotate in slow circles through this evil stinking old folks' home where the Bad Nurse had smuggled me for the night. In my mind I was in some kind of large gymnasium type room with those fold out wooden bleachers on the side. My automatically rolling bed was rolling me through this wide room in unpredictable circles and I was tugging on my chest tubes to try to manipulate the turns; I was convinced that these tubes were stuck in the wheel of the gurney. My nurses were checking on me all night and I was begging them to take me back to my room. I had no voice (tracheotomy) so I was struggling to explain what was going on. They handed me my whiteboard and marker and I tried to write in it but had horrible double vision. I said I wanted to go back to room "419" or something like that, which had no relation to reality. They tried to tell me I was already in my room and everything was okay. But in my hallucination I could see a room I could be comfortable in at one end of the gymnasium by the pop machines. I felt like if they would just put me in there I could finally get some sleep.

Meanwhile I am laughing on the inside because this is so loving absurd, and I remember clearly thinking I was trapped in a Seinfeld episode and that my nurse was punishing my for something my wife's ancestors had done to her ancestors and I was the poor sap she was able to sadistically mess with to get back at my wife, or something. Meanwhile this sweet nurse is trying to console me, saying how much she loves me and my wife and our story and how we are both so sweet. But in my warped reality, her words turned extremely mocking and sarcastic; "Oh, you and your wife are SOOOOOO sweet" etc. And then I was hallucinating that in a side room of the gym there was a dance studio and a bunch of overweight Asian women walked past me and into this dance studio. Next thing I know I am hearing thumping bass that I identify as that "I Like Big Butts" song. And of course I am still stuck on this drat slowly moving stretcher car thing that I can't control. Eventually my rolling stretcher rolls me right down a small flight of 4-5 stairs at the corner of the gym and gets stuck with me kind of propped up at a 45 degree angle. I remember spending what felt like hours wondering when they would get me, how they were gonna get my stretcher up these stairs, and whether they would get in trouble for smuggling me from the ICU to this weird place.

I must have fallen asleep at some point because then I was half conscious and back in the ICU, but there was an amazing auditory hallucination ringing out again and again as I struggled to gain consciousness. It was like a piercing, crystalline guitar chord. Extremely unearthly and pure sounding, and it kept hitting me and blasting through me at sort of random times. Then I started to figure out a kind of rock music going on underneath it, and finally my brain came up with this idea that it was a pop band playing a concert somewhere in Toronto that I was hearing, and my evil nurse had tuned a radio to it and was playing it loudly in my room. I thought I overheard her saying how much she loved this band and that her son was at the concert. And then I figured out that the band I was hearing was an alien force that had come to brainwash our youth with this crazy music, and that they had evil intentions, and that my nurse was somehow deeply involved.

I ended up being extremely afraid of that nurse for days after, even though the insanity of these hallucinations made them impossible to believe after they were over. I think I just described an episode of ICU induced psychosis, actually. When I spoke about it later, my nurses told me they often had patients who wanted to have a phone so they could call 911 and get rescued from their nurses.

Turpitude fucked around with this message at 23:55 on Feb 17, 2015

Turpitude
Oct 13, 2004

Love love love

be an organ donor
Soiled Meat

IAmThatIs posted:

http://news.yahoo.com/chile-leader-visits-ailing-14-old-wants-end-215510390.html

The article is about a 14-year old Chilean girl who wants Euthanasia because she has CF. You have obviously fought quite a bit to stay alive with CF, so what do you think of this?

I support death with dignity but her age makes it complicated. I don't know the wishes of her parents or the extent of her condition. Cystic Fibrosis is an incredibly variable disease. They say it 'used to' be a childhood disease, but it can still be extreme enough to be lethal to some little ones. As an example from my own life, I know a man with CF who was born in 1969. He only needed his first transplant in 2011. Meanwhile my sister was born in 1977 and her condition was severe enough that she didn't make it past the age of 6.

Turpitude
Oct 13, 2004

Love love love

be an organ donor
Soiled Meat

potatoducks posted:

So your parents already knew they were carriers. Did they give any thought to things like adoption? Or did they make a conscious decision to roll the dice again? Do you have any other siblings? Do you know how they took your diagnosis given that it was their second time around and (I assume) an informed decision? Any "regrets" on their part or would they do things differently?

I'm interested in this type of decision making process when there is such a high chance of something going wrong. I think the stakes are much lower nowadays given the availability of early genetic testing.

Second time around was indeed an informed decision. The math is that if both parents are carriers, they have a 25% chance of the child having CF. So they threw the d4 again and had a second child with CF. It was scary for them at first but I did much better than my sister from an early age. At birth, my doctors told my parents that I was going to outlive them. My mom was in a panic and immediately grieving when I was born with the disease, but things settled down and I had a pretty stress free childhood, with no hospitalizations until age 12 when I needed a sinus polyp removed. I grew up in the shadow of my deceased big sister and played with her toys, and her passing made my parents love and care for me even more. I guess I was what they called a rainbow baby?

My mom says she has no regrets and wouldn't change a thing. I have a feeling my dad feels the same way. I look forward to giving them the gift of a grandchild, and hopefully I will outlive them both!

Turpitude
Oct 13, 2004

Love love love

be an organ donor
Soiled Meat
Small update: I did some sleuthing and discovered the identity of my second donor, whose lungs are currently in my body. He was a young man (a few years younger than me) who suffered a vehicle related head trauma and ended up donating his organs. He was kind and loving and his main bucket list wish was to get married and have kids, which I am pursuing. I truly wish I could offer the family some comfort, but I am not going to approach them other than to perhaps sending a second letter in late May, for my 2 year lungiversary.

Also, my memoir writing prof said I should try to publish my second assignment, which makes me very happy!

Turpitude
Oct 13, 2004

Love love love

be an organ donor
Soiled Meat

beckyogg posted:

I'm glad you're doing well, it's always nice to see another CFer surviving and living well despite the crap that we have to wade through.

Before the new lungs, did you find that stuff that irritated normal people's lungs also irritated yours, like pollen or mildew? I'm beginning to suspect that my parents' house may be full of mold, because I keep feeling crappier whenever I go visit them, but I've never really encountered mold in any other circumstance where I could do a comparison.

Also, sorry to pump you for information, do you have any CF forums or whatever that you frequent that was more inclined toward adult patients than towards parents? I don't know about you, but I find most online communities that have the parents of CFers involved start to skew heavily towards manic hopefulness and constant "God Bless!" and "praying for our child!" and "every day is a blessing", which rubs me the wrong way for various reasons.


Hey beckyogg! Glad to see you are still kicking too!

It's tough to say whether pollen or mildew irritated my lungs, since I was coughing all the time anyway. I am not sure how much mold I was exposed to. There are definitely small amounts of mold in my house but afaik I've never had problems with it. If you are noticing a correlation between lung gunk (or just feelings of fatigue/illness) and your parents house then you should probably trust your body, though. Maybe have a specific room that is cleaned and bleached, and buy one of those HEPA air filters to run full time around your visit.

The only CF forums I visited was a few years ago, but they were on livejournal and not *that* adult, but was parent free. http://cystic-fibrosis.livejournal.com/ It looks kinda dead now, though. There may be some facebook groups... my wife is in one for wives of people with CF. I dunno about reddit.

If there isn't one, I would be up for starting a forum with you :) I have lots of contacts I could drag in to post a thing or two.

Turpitude
Oct 13, 2004

Love love love

be an organ donor
Soiled Meat

Tomberforce posted:

Hey Turpitude, I read your incredible old threads and tried to find them again recently but couldn't. Just to chime in and say that I'm so, so glad you're still here and doing well! You're an inspiration man.

some texas redneck posted:

TURP! :neckbeard:

Glad to see you're still kicking rear end and taking names. Like others, once the original thread didn't get updated for awhile, I assumed the worst. I've never been so happy to be wrong.

Thanks guys! It's very good to be alive. I have a link to the old thread in the OP of this one, not sure if works.

---

I have published my second and third memoir assignments to medium.com here: https://medium.com/@jreimer23/ They both tie in with my transplant experiences. I am going to seek publication for the second one though I need to work on it some more. The third is getting peer reviewed with my classmates tomorrow. I wrote that one in a very short amount of time and was really sick. It needs some fleshing out.

Turpitude
Oct 13, 2004

Love love love

be an organ donor
Soiled Meat

Jeherrin posted:

You are incredible. I don't think I can say anything else.

Thank you. If you have any ideas of things I should write about, let me know.

ZombieLenin posted:

gently caress man. In 2012 I was in the hospital for a month and ended up having surgery on my left lung. I had one of those loving things--a chest tube--and I was in so much pain the maximum dose of dualadid did nothing for me. I was literally so miserable I more than once thought that dying might have been better...

All this is to say, you are an incredibly strong person for having endured all of that and simultaneously stayed so positive. You're literally God like in my estimation for this.

Edit:

Your first transplant developed popcorn lung. Weird.

Haha, thank you. And yeah, "popcorn lung" is the same condition, bronchiolitis obliterans, but I can assure you all that I was *not* huffing microwave popcorn between transplants.

The only thing worse than having a chest tube is having it pulled out. One time I was half awake and two doctors came into my room and decided to pull out two of them at the same time. First they pull what seems like 4 feet of thick tubing out of a small hole between your ribs, which feels like being stabbed with a spear in reverse, and then they haul on the stitches with all their might, leaving you with a puckered, burning injury tied in a little black bow.

Turpitude
Oct 13, 2004

Love love love

be an organ donor
Soiled Meat
such a strange t shirt... what could it mean? :confused:

Turpitude
Oct 13, 2004

Love love love

be an organ donor
Soiled Meat
Thanks guys :) We got pregnant on the first try with ICSI. I had to get my testicles biopsied to retrieve the sperm which was very painful, but it was even worse for Adena because the hormones were not kind to her! We are very lucky to not have to do that again. We also have several frozen, high quality embryos if we ever want to make another!

Turpitude
Oct 13, 2004

Love love love

be an organ donor
Soiled Meat

Dick Trauma posted:

Congratulations Turp. Sorry about your balls.

Thank you Dick Trauma, it means a lot coming from you

Turpitude
Oct 13, 2004

Love love love

be an organ donor
Soiled Meat

loki k zen posted:

This is gonna sound like a weird question but you already answered anything else I would have asked:

So, obviously if this is too personal ignore me, but if you don't have a vas deferens does that mean you basically ejaculate liquid with no sperm in it? Is that a noticeably different colour or texture to semen with sperm?

Aside from any of that congratulations, and you have prompted me to double check my organ donor registration since I'm not sure if it's valid if my driving license with it on has expired. Obviously I hope I don't randomly die between now and getting a new license (or for some considerable time after that) but if I do it ought to at least have a chance of contributing to the continued existence of someone like you.

My blood is garbage to donation people but I bet I have some usable bits in here somewhere.

The most important thing re: being a donor is letting your next of kin know your wishes. You want them to be like, "our dead son always did say he wanted to be a donor" if the time comes that they have to make that decision.

I don't have any experience with other men's spunk other than what I've seen in porn so I can't speak to texture. But yeah, all I ejaculate is seminal fluid and it is clear rather than cloudy looking.

Turpitude
Oct 13, 2004

Love love love

be an organ donor
Soiled Meat

potatoducks posted:

Did your wife undergo any genetic testing?

Yep, she is clear of the most common CF mutations that make up approx. 99.5% of the disease population.

Turpitude
Oct 13, 2004

Love love love

be an organ donor
Soiled Meat

BLerchg posted:

This whole thread was incredibly scary to read, especially all the kind of stuff that can go wrong or did go wrong. But at the same time it was really inspiring to read your story. I really hope that neither me nor my family ever come into the same situation, but i am glad to know that people can come out of such a mess and still be positive thinking persons.

Did you always have this attitude towards life or did your philosophy change over the course of the last few years?

I actually struggled with depression from high school until my early 20s-very common for people with CF. I was extremely lonely and constantly feeling sick. I came close to killing myself a few times. It was only with a lot of hard work and support that i was able to break away from it and pursue transplant. It took a few years for me to reach the point I was willing to fight to stay alive. During that time a very special goonette was my lifeline. She flew from London, England to Vancouver BC, Canada to spend some time with me. Then later when my lungs really failed and I was in Toronto trying to get on the transplant list she visited me again and gave me another boost. She proved to me that there were things worth looking forward to in life! Then not much later I met my wife to be, and had something truly concrete and real to focus my hopes and dreams on.

ineptmule posted:

I'm very very pleased to see that you are still around and doing so well. When I read your last thread I just lurked and got very worried when it went quiet. It was around that time, I think, that a girl I went to school with finally succumbed to her CF. My school friends were a close group even though I lost touch with her in later years, and it was really sobering to read your stories.

Best of luck with everything that is to come :)

Yeah, I have lost way way too many friends to this loving disease.

Turpitude
Oct 13, 2004

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be an organ donor
Soiled Meat
Here's a pic of our daughter :) I will make an effort post next ~.~

Turpitude
Oct 13, 2004

Love love love

be an organ donor
Soiled Meat

That's my mutation, the something Delta 508 something something. Most common one! That means that for the majority of CF patients we might finally have an effective cure. I have been paying attention to these treatments since they were first theorized! To see my disease being conquered in my lifetime is something I have always hoped for but never entirely believed would happen. To see it happening gives me immeasurable joy! I know several people with CF kids who I am so, so happy for.

Thin Privilege posted:

Seriously?

Because I went out of my way to contact the state to be on the list.

Also turp pls keep us updated, especially with pics :neckbeard:

Dead bodies have no rights, if your next of kin says not to harvest your organs then the doctors simply won't do it. Sucks, but that's how it will be until we have an opt-out system instead of the current opt-in one.

extra stout posted:

How much time did you spend thinking about your mortality when things were at their worst, and how much time do you spend on it now? Did you feel better trusting your doctors, or did you always make sure to research and understand each new procedure and medication?

Thanks for sharing and congratulations on being alive!

You ask some great and complex questions, and I have procrastinated replying for that reason :) Thinking about mortality was constant in the years leading up to my first transplant. I was extremely depressed and my impending death was always on my mind. All day every day. I turned to video games to turn my brain off for months at a time because being active was impossible with how sick I was. And I just kind of held on for a while, then got some therapy and managed to pull myself out of that mental hole. When I finally got the Swine Flu in 2010 and went on oxygen, I think I really surprised my doc by telling him I wanted to go for the transplant in Toronto. I think I had convinced him pretty well that I had given up on myself in the years prior.

Oddly enough I didn't think about my death very much before the second transplant. I faced it as a likely possibility and kind of put it out of my mind. Still, I said goodbye to my mom and my wife several times before major operations. I wasn't necessarily afraid of dying when we said goodbye. My wife and I had a solid understanding that whatever happened would happen and that she would be okay.

After the second transplant, my soul was still half in the land of the dead, my emotions went absolutely bonkers, and I wept for days with horrible thoughts/visions of death. I was also wracked with survivor's guilt. It took a long time to pull out of that PTSD. Today I have reached and possibly surpassed my prognosis. I am in uncharted territory now and I actually make an effort not to think about it. I don't expect to live a long time, and yet there is no sign of me slowing down! Because we have a baby on the way, we do have to talk about it though, and I find it extremely difficult. In some ways, scarier than before.

To your second question, my wife and I both became experts on everything that had to do with me. I trusted my doctors because I had no choice, really, but also out of sincere respect. A number of mistakes were made over my 6 months in the ICU, sometimes the same mistake more than once, but that is the reality of being in that place for so long with staff constantly rotating. Adena became my guardian and made sure they didn't gently caress anything up too badly.

Khazar-khum posted:

Congrats on the little Turpling!

I hadn't been to A/T in a year, wondered how you were, and now--a daddy!

I love when goons say that, they thought about me a year later... I love all you guys so much. You've supported me through two transplants now!

Turpitude
Oct 13, 2004

Love love love

be an organ donor
Soiled Meat

Parahexavoctal posted:

Super sad question:

what are the kid's odds of having CF?

Hard to calculate but extremely unlikely. If you look back at my posts, my wife has had genetic testing. There are thousands of mutations of CF but they test for the most common 99.5%, and my wife is clear! We are both a little stressed about it (so much bad poo poo has happened to us that it is hard not to expect the worst) but I expect us to be relieved when our daughter is born without CF.

bonus: recent article about me from the local newspaper. They got a bunch of stuff wrong (the dude didn't seem to get that I have had two DOUBLE lung transplants) but it is still nice :)
http://www.saanichnews.com/news/304640621.html

Turpitude
Oct 13, 2004

Love love love

be an organ donor
Soiled Meat
Sorry for ignoring thread for months. Here is something I whipped up today

edit: no clue how to timg an attachment. its my thread and I can tablebreak if I want to!

Only registered members can see post attachments!

Turpitude
Oct 13, 2004

Love love love

be an organ donor
Soiled Meat

Horizontal Tree posted:

I get and am starting my Orkambi tomorrow. I'm a little scared.

Congratulations!! I hope it works wonders for you.

Turpitude
Oct 13, 2004

Love love love

be an organ donor
Soiled Meat
Hey guys, just wanted to post and say I am a daddy now! Our baby girl, Lilah Joan, was born on Saturday at 3:48am. She is perfect in every way!

Turpitude
Oct 13, 2004

Love love love

be an organ donor
Soiled Meat


thank you donor

Turpitude
Oct 13, 2004

Love love love

be an organ donor
Soiled Meat

Sockmuppet posted:

Congratulations! You have a tiny person now, that's the weirdest and most awesome feeling in the whole world :3: Re the wristbands, I was really hoping you'd get the homebirth you both wanted, did you end up having to go to the hospital, or was this just a checkup later?

We did not get the homebirth we were preparing for, wifey's blood pressure was climbing and we had to induce to avoid pre-eclampsia. Baby was still delivered vaginally, with no assistance from an OBGYN; just our midwife, a nurse, and me in the room with wifey. I got to catch baby when she burst out! So we spent 24 hours in hospital at the advice of our midwife and went home Sunday morning after everything checked out.

Turpitude
Oct 13, 2004

Love love love

be an organ donor
Soiled Meat

Parahexavoctal posted:

Did you bank her cord blood?

No, we didn't

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Turpitude
Oct 13, 2004

Love love love

be an organ donor
Soiled Meat

mizbachevenim posted:

Fatherly advise, get the rear end wipe warmer.

thats a really good idea, she flips out when the cold wipe makes contact. will mention this to wifey, thanks dad!

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