Holy Moses!

Brace yourself for this....wait for it....wait for it....

This week we got a letter from Mayo Clinic....and today I got a phone call. I know. You weren't expecting that at all. Neither was I.


I called the Dr's office AGAIN after I had first called on the 15th. This would be on the 21st. (a week later) she says she sent it in (again) I waited a few days and called the Dr.'s office on Friday the 25th. She said she sent it on the 22nd (ummm...so why didn't you send it on the 15th when I first talked to you?! Whatever) This time the chick put on some brains  and called Mayo to make sure they had it. HOLY COW THEY DID!!! Last Wednesday we got the letter, today we got the phone call.

So here's the LD. His information has been sent to the fiance department so they will contact our Insurance to see if they will pay for his testing. The lady said that can take 30-60 days. Heaven knows with our luck it'll be 60. Once that is all cleared we can schedule him for testing which is usually about 4 weeks out. So we may just have this started by summer. haha.

Like we expected, he will have about 3-5 days of out patient testing up in Phoenix. It's all out patient so he won't have to spend any hospital nights. Once all those tests are done and he is accepted we can start testing live donors. They will only test one person at a time. If that person is a match, no one else gets tested. If not, then the next person is tested. So once he's accepted, we'll all draw straws to see who's first :P haha. J.K. I intend to go first.

He got his machine so he can do his exchanges at night while he sleeps and I think he has mixed feelings about it. I think he likes the fact he doesn't have to deal with manual exchanges, but he doesn't sleep very well (sometimes I don't sleep very well) It's not a real loud machine. It's just like a pumping sound. Hopefully he'll get used to it so he can get better sleep. The other thing that sucks is he has to be hooked up to the thing for 9 hours and 50 mins...which is kind of long. I mean who sleeps for 9 hours and 50 mins? So for him to make it to work on time he has to be hooked up by 7:30.  Who goes to bed at 7:30? He's figured it out so he hooks up at 7:30, then unhooks after the first exchange the machine does then he can hook up again around 9:30 so that's made it a little better.

Now for pictures. I just downloaded pictures from my camera....and realized that I hadn't done it in a year. haha. I had just went out with Stacey and Brandon for Seth's birthday and still had pictures on my camera from his previous birthday. Oh well. What can I say? I'm slow to download my personal stuff.


Both these pictures are of Dustin's first Hemo dialysis in the hospital (when the nurse thought I was a freak for taking them). It was interesting for me to see these pictures again. It made me feel sad, but as we were in the hospital and I saw it in real life I didn't feel that way. I don't know if it was the fact that I was trying really hard at the hospital to be strong or if was just because I was so calm that week. Either way, It kinda makes me sad to  see it now.

The 2 tubes (Ash catheter) coming from his shoulder are inserted into a central vein in his neck. One took his blood out then it would go through the machine next to him and the other tube put the cleaned blood back in. It cycled through quite a few times. Each treatment took 3 hours If I remember right.

Dustin and His sister, Trisha's, little guy. They were probably watching Micky Mouse something.

His PD Machine. It's pretty small and on rollers so it's easy to move around and even travel with if we need to. It's programed to do the exchanges he needs. He hooks up all his bags to the machine, hooks himself up to the bags and presses start. It does the rest for him.

So that's the tube out of his stomach. The largest blue section is where it hooks up to the tubes that are hooked to his machine. From the hole (the dark spot) in his stomach to that large blue part just under his hand is the entire tube that is always with him. He has a velcro belt he wears that the tube straps into so it's not in the way during the day. I made him hold it up to show how long it is. haha.