A Heart of Gratitude

I know it has been awhile since I last posted, but often times no news is good news, and that is the case here. Carrie and I have enjoyed a relaxing month together. I have been continuing to exercise (walking, biking, weights), I’ve been pushing some of my limits by doing more around the house and yard, and we have been able to get away for a couple short holidays. It has been a good month.
 
Picking up where I left off in my last post, in mid-August I repeated a number of the pre-transplant workup tests that I had originally done back at the end of May. The difference between the two was quite obvious. I am back to my baseline weight (maybe even a kg over it), and my lung function and exercise tolerance has continued to improve week by week. My lungs are nowhere near their original baseline, but they are also nowhere near where they were when I was discharged from hospital.
 
Throughout July and August, Carrie and I have been going to transplant clinic once a month. We were their yesterday, and it turned out to be quite the visit. My doctor basically outlined that unless my lung function begins declining, or unless I get an infection again, we are no longer going to talk about re-transplant! I have been taken off the re-transplant “radar” and have been told to go and live my life and we’ll just see where things go.
 
This is amazing and humbling news. I won’t lie, this is secretly what we were hoping for, but to actually hear it from my doctor is quite another thing. This doesn’t mean I can just return to life as it was before I got sick, but it means we can continue living into this new normal that we have created over the summer without the immediate cloud of transplant hanging over us.
 
The transplant doctor that Carrie and I saw yesterday is one of two doctors who has been part of my transplant story since the very beginning. He said that in all the years he has been working with transplant patients, my case over the last half year ranks up there as one of the most unique cases he has seen. Going from being intubated with acute rejection in May, being told in June that it would be a matter of weeks until I would be waitlisted for re-transplant, and now recovering enough that there is no time frame for when we will need to talk about this again is quite a unique thing. It is a miracle.
 
He did reiterate that I am not out of the woods. I still have a lot of scar tissue in my lungs, and there is that pesky infection sitting dormant down there still, but it does seem we have been given the green light to stop “waiting to be waitlisted” and instead learn how to live life with my lungs in their new state.
 
If there is one thing that Carrie and I feel right now, it is gratitude. Gratitude for this miracle journey of recovery I have been on; gratitude for all your prayers, thoughts, support, and well wishes. Life is still delicate, my lungs are still fragile, but we have to seize these moments of gratitude and joy when we can.