Taper

Let me first start off by saying that I will never, and I mean NEVER, get lab work done on a Monday morning.  I usually walk in, sign in, give them my orange jug of pee, get some blood taken, then I'm out.  I got there 20 min before my appointment time of 10am & the waiting room was FULL.  As I signed in, I was the only one with an appointment time so I thought that would help.  After 30 minutes of waiting, I was getting ticked.  Oh, did I mention I had ALL THREE kids with me?  Oh they were going NUTS.  I wanted to kill myself.  Or them.  Or the lab people.

It was one of those days... where I could feel the Prednisone taking over my personality and making my head spin like a she-devil.  I went up to the front, fully planning on being confrontational.  And I lived up to my expectations.  I thought I was going to loose it when she said I was being SKIPPED OVER because I had checked the box that said I had a specimen to drop off.  Well... I DID HAVE A SPECIMEN TO DROP OF LADY!!!! I also have an APPOINTMENT TIME!  What kind of idiot would make an appointment if they ONLY had a pee jug to drop off?  Ugh.  I hate stupid people.

Ok, so that was that... fast forward to today...

I had my appointment to get my results.  My protein is WAY down.  YAY!  It started at 5600mg before treatment, then 1000mg after 2 weeks of treatment.  This week it was 150mg, which is ALMOST in the normal range.  The only issue in all of my labs was my creatinine was up to 1.19, which is high.  Not TOO high, but high.  So the dr. adjust my BP medicine {lower} and she said that'd help.  Who knows-- I haven't done this long enough to know how that all works.

ANYHOW... the big news is that I'm going into REMISSION & I get to start to lower my dose of Prednisone!  As of tomorrow, I'll be on 40mg a day rather than 60mg.  Its going to be a very slow process.  High doses of Pred for long periods of time shuts down your adrenal glands so they have to be given time to "wake up" or bad things happen.  Studies also show that the FSGS can come back if you taper too quickly.  So I'll be on 40mg for another 6 weeks.  I'll get more testing in 2 weeks then in 6 weeks.  After 6 weeks, hopefully I can drop another dose.

40mg is probably still enough to keep me going on the side effects, which sucks, but its better than 60.  And we're moving in the right direction.

And P.S. the nurses & dr. at the nephrologist office love me.  I'm charming like that. J