The Life and Lungs of Kim

On this weekend six years ago, two hearts abruptly ceased beating. One heart was mourned as the loss of a beloved mother, wife, new grandmother, respected civil servant and dear friend. The other heart was only a couple months away from also being mourned but because of this first heart’s tragedy, the fatigued and unsuspecting heart was intentionally and temporarily stopped so it could receive a gift: a beautiful pair of lungs, not yet finished on this earth. It took many weeks for that heart to learn how to welcome these strange and shocked lungs — when you’ve spent years adjusting to the darkness, the sunlight can blind and overwhelm. But through a relentless medical team and a body’s basic will to live, a balance was found and the rebirth was complete. ————— Although my thoughts are mostly consumed in the day-to-day, the mundane, the hustle and bustle and the first world problems, it’s lovely to take a moment to reflect on these past six “bonus” years I’ve had. I’m certai...

As of this moment, I have accomplished a 5-year goal: I am alive. Even though I know that my long-term survival prognosis was higher than that average because of my relatively young age at the time of transplant (40), disease (Pulmonary Hypertension) and transplant team (Dr. Mulligan, et al, at the University of Washington), all of us lung transplant patients have that “five-year survival rate” stuck in our brains. My life is forever altered because of my surgery 5 years ago and I will continue a life-long regiment of immunosuppressant medications (four of the “big guns” then another 6-10 to manage the side effects of those 4), frequent blood tests (currently every month) and lung transplant clinic appointments at UW (every six months. I’ll be there next Tuesday for a bunch of poking and prodding, including my lung function test, blood labs, chest x-ray, bone density test and mammogram). Although my horrible, awful, no-good, soul-sucking migraines are a thing of the past (...

This is very "Life Not Lungs" of Kim but just to keep it appropriate on this blog: I'm also doing very well, health-wise. Lung function test last week was the best it's ever been, blood pressure low, lost 50 points on my cholesterol and migraines totally controllable. I've also lost a little bit of the weight I gained last year but the way I've been nervous-eating then comfort-eating the past week, I'm not going to tout that statistic. I wrote a big ol’ post last Monday night and saved it for adding to and sharing after Hillary’s inspiring win. That will obviously never see the light of day and saddens me to no end. But I want to take a moment to express my gratitude at how many people have reached out to me to see how I’m doing. You’d think I had a lung transplant or something. There’s much we don’t know: how much of Trump’s support was due to his stoking the fears of the people, how much was the anti-Hillary/anti-establishment vote, how much was h...

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...

Another milestone in my post-lung transplant life reached yesterday: I forgot which floor to go to at the University of Washington medical center from the parking garage. For 8 years, I spent months’ worth of time at that dang place, from my frequent Pulmonary Hypertension specialist appointments to my biannual echo cardiograms…and blood tests, lung function tests, support group meetings, X-rays, many ER visits, week-longs stays, right heart catheterizations and more. Of course, once I got my bearings, it came back to me and I practically bounded from appointment to appointment because one thing I never did pre-transplant is bound. Next time, skipping. 21 months out from my double lung transplant and all my tests look great, no worries, and I even was able to get rid of one of my twice daily medications so now I’m *only* taking 12 meds a day. Four of those are lifelong anti-rejection/anti-infection meds and the other 8 are to combat the side effects of those four. It’s a lot of pil...