The Life and Lungs of Kim

Text reads: Today, June 16, 2015, marks my 2 ½ year anniversary of my double lung transplant. We didn’t know my surgery would result in a 6-week hospital stay and that the complications post-surgery would be very difficult and puzzling for my medical team to figure out. A few weeks after the surgery, I had a tracheotomy and that allowed the ventilator to come out of my mouth so I could eventually eat again and start physical therapy. Finally, 26 days after surgery, I achieved a major accomplishment: I did an entire lap around the ICU floor. All the nurses and staff were cheering me on (I was in ICU for such a long time, I think almost everyone knew me) and though it was one of the hardest things I had ever done, that lap was a turning point in my rehabilitation. And that feeling of exhausted determination, of not wanting to go on but knowing that there was no other way than to continue putting one foot in front of the other, was echoed this past weekend when I walked 13.1 miles i...

I don’t like running. Never have, despite playing soccer all through my youth. And now, as an almost 43-year old mom with someone else’s lungs in my chest cavity, running seems practically impossible (high functioning lungs = kind of critical for running, no?). There are many physical barriers on top of my already present mental barriers. I feel tightness across my chest still. My entire body suffered from a lack of oxygen for over six years and I don’t really know what the lasting effects of that are though I do know at the time, it was awful, I was in right heart failure and I lost a lot of strength. I've done short sprints maybe three times in the past two years and probably jogged a total of 300 yards. And, as I may have mentioned, I don’t like running. But I’m curious to see what these lungs and this body can do so  I went ahead and signed up to do a half marathon in June .  To be fair, I am only committing to run/WALKING it so I’m not trying...

I’m just over two years out from my double lung transplant now and yesterday I had my regular series of tests and appointments at the UW Lung Transplant Clinic. My blood work looks good (we’re mostly looking for high creatinine levels in my kidneys, an unfortunate side effect of my immunosuppressant medications, and can be a sign of rejection). My lung function test (where I blast a breath into a machine and squeeze it all out until my tummy hurts) was the highest it's ever been. Nothing looks weird in my chest X-ray and overall, things are great. I do have to keep an eye on my bone density levels – another common occurrence post-transplant is bone loss/ osteopenia due to the high amounts of Prednisone given to me in the hospital (I went home on 70 mg of Prednisone a day; today, I take 5 mg and will take that for the rest of my life). The hope is that with all the calcium, vitamin D and magnesium oxide I take every day, the osteopenia that has shown up in my hips will st...