The practical side, diet, glucose management, medications, the day-to-day.
On the morning of October 3rd, 2024, I sent a text to my buddy Eric. I told him things had taken another downturn. That afternoon they were going to implant a temporary LVAD. I told him I might not come back from this. He responded the way Eric responds: with a bad joke about the…
This is the companion piece to “The Year of Living Carefully” which covers what it actually felt like to live inside the constraints of an immunosuppressed state. This piece covers the clinical and biological dimensions of post-transplant immune management. The discharge paperwork covers a lot of ground. Medication schedules. Dietary restrictions. Follow-up appointments. Warning signs….
Part Two of Two This is Part Two of a two-part series on Cardiac Allograft Vasculopathy (CAV). Part One—“The Diagnosis Nobody Prepares You For”—covers what CAV is, the history of how medicine learned to detect it, and why the statistics that come up first on a search do not describe the situation most recipients are…
Part One of Two This is Part One of a two-part series on Cardiac Allograft Vasculopathy. Part Two — “The Long Game: Treatment, Management, and What Comes Next” — covers the full treatment toolkit, the metabolic management picture, what the transplant community has learned from years and decades of lived experience, and what ongoing management…
Nobody hands you a shopping list at discharge. They hand you prescriptions, a follow-up schedule, and a set of dietary restrictions. What you actually need to manage the day-to-day reality of post-transplant life—the tools, the devices, the supplies—you figure out by trial and error, usually after the error. This piece is the list. Everything here…
At some point during my pre-transplant hospitalization, someone counted. Fifty vials of blood, give or take, drawn over the course of the initial workup—roughly 250 milliliters, a full cup of yourself handed over one tiny vacuum-sealed tube at a time, all in a single sitting. The arithmetic of it doesn’t fully register until you’re on…
The discharge packet covers the medications, the follow-up schedule, the dietary restrictions, the warning signs to watch for. It does not cover what the next several months are going to feel like. This piece is that conversation. The Pharmacological Reality The immunosuppressant regimen is not optional and it is not gentle. Each drug is doing…
