Monday, June 09, 2008

Donate Life

Hello all. Long time no see. Things have been wild here in the land of Morriss. The last 6 months or so has been sort of a hard road to hoe. A lot of things have happened that I knew were coming, but were still a shock when they occurred.

So here it is, without too many details:

Last August, my Dad was fishing down at the coast. He just bought a new boat, and life was good. While fishing, we think that some water got into an open sore on his leg. From that, a bacterial infection popped up on his leg. There's a really fancy word for the type of infection it is, but that slips my mind at the time. It was like a staph infection basically. When he decided that it wasn't going to just go away, he went to a doctor in Kerrville and was referred to wound care clinic at Peterson Ambulatory care center.

While making his twice weekly visits to the wound care center, the doctor told him that his leg wasn't heeling as well as it should, and he should go have some blood work done to check and see if anything else was hindering his ability to heal. From this blood work, we found that he had severe Liver disease, and we needed to a specialist sooner than later.

That was in late September, early October. After getting treatment from the doctors, we thought we had it figured out. We knew that a transplant would have to occur someday, but not in the foreseeable future. All of November, and December he felt great. In early January he started going down hill again, and we didn't exactly know why. We had some more numbers run, and it turned out that because of his liver disease, his kidneys were now failing.

This was all around the time of the last post I made. I was out in Arizona, and got a call on a Thursday morning and told I needed to come home because things weren't looking good. We brought him down to the Texas Transplant Institute at Methodist Hospital and had our first meeting with "the team". They told him that he needed a liver transplant, sooner than later, and that because of his kidney condition, he might need a kidney transplant as well. We spent 10 days in the hospital then, running through all the tests, and jumping through all the hoops that needed to be jumped through.

After a several week wait, we were put on the transplant list, with a very high level of priority and almost a month later he had his surgery. We were lucky there, because we were so high on priority. (There are many people who spend years on the list. Some people who are just getting kidneys have waited up to 6 years!)

He's now been in ICU for 44 days. It's crazy that we've been here this long. The usual hospital stay is somewhere from 10-14 days. That's total hospital time (not just ICU)! Every case is different though. He was very weak when he came in, and we've hit some pretty severe speed bumps along the way. All they were, were bumps though. We're on the right road now. Still in ICU, still a long road ahead of us, but there's a light at the end of the tunnel...

That was kind of the cliff's notes version of what went on. I didn't tell the story with the idea of anyone feeling sorry for us. The truth is, I wanted to let y'all know about what you can do to help. Not help me, but just help anyone else who's in the same position we've been in.

Before all this happened, I wasn't sure if organ donation was something I was interested in. I didn't think I wanted my body picked through for all my bits and pieces after I expire. After meeting all the people at TTI, and meeting a lot of their patients, I can't think of any reason not to be a donor.

Seriously though, what are you going to do with your organs when you're gone?

I know that's a sensitive subject, and I respect anyone's decision on not being a donor. It's just a personal thing.

However, for those of you who want to be a donor, but don't know exactly how to do it, here's how...

http://www.donatelifetexas.org/

That'll work for anyone in Texas.

Anyone else, go to http://www.donatelife.net/, and pick your state.

I never knew anyone who had gone through this, and in the amount of time we've been in here, another friend's Dad received a liver donation. It happens to more people than you think.

Thanks for your time! I hope life is going great for all of you!