A wonderful, great, super clinic day

In four short words, "Ben is doing GREAT!" His liver levels dropped dramatically and the surgeon is very happy with them now. His theory is that there was a clot in the bile duct and when they injected the dye, it blew the clot out and the bile started flowing better. Maybe I suppose. My theory is that he just needed a few more days on his higher dose of Prograf (a immunosuppressive drug). Regardless, we'll take the good news :)

Also, they agreed that he could lower his blood pressure med dose and he's down to just 10 units of Lantus (a long acting insulin) a night with a plan to get him off of it completely next week and then if his blood sugar levels remain under 150, Ben can even stop testing four times a day. Progress, progress, progress! Of course, he's still on nine or ten other meds each day but he's working on getting off of some of those too.

The last great news was that the surgeon feels that Ben's wound is healing well and the wound vac is doing exactly what it needs to be doing. The very best thing of all though is that Ben is no longer a twice a week clinic patient :) He's down to once a week. Don't get me wrong, clinic is a wonderful thing. However, it truely is the only thing you manage to accomplish on those days. No eating or drinking after midnight, then up at 5:45 a.m., to the hospital lab by 7 a.m., then wait around for a while until you're called in to the clinic for vitals and then everyone goes to eat breakfast and take meds and then it's back to the clinic waiting area by 9:30 a.m. where the patients are called in a few at a time to see the surgeons so your wait could be 10 minutes, or it could be an hour and a half. For instance, today we got done at noon, so five hours in the hospital. That's a lot to ask of a healthy person, let alone someone that's been through a transplant.

So, all in all, it was a great day, full of great news. That is, until you get us started about the insurance and their blatent lies about one of Ben's meds. In the interest of my blood pressure ;), I'll leave that story for another day. Just watch out if you use Caremark/CVS. They will lie, provide false information and generally give you the run-a-round to avoid filling expensive prescriptions. We'll see if they redeem themselves over the next 24 hours.