Day 5 Hospital Update

“Good news!” Dr. Aragón proclaimed when he came in my room this morning! My creatinine is down from 9.3 to 8.1 today, which is a major improvement from the original 11.6. I didn’t even get any dialysis pep talks! The Nephrologist said hopefully I won’t need it at this point! Huge answer to prayer – pray that he doesn’t change his mind and that my kidneys continue to go down at such a rapid rate! The doctors did, however, give me a new estimated time of being in the hospital. It will be at least another week, so my goal leave date is now 1/25. I do have cable tv (mostly Spanish, but some English channels) and air conditioning here, neither of which we have at our house so I guess there is something “luxurious” about this hospital stay, but the idea of being in this bed and eating hospital food for another week is a little depressing. All visitors are welcome (even if you just want to sit in a/c and watch tv with me!) [Correction: I wrote that this morning and have since had several visitors and learned that I can only have 1 (though I got them to budge to 2) visitors at a time, and you can’t be sick when you come! Oops!] I do have my mom here now, which has been so great! It has freed Chase up to go home and take care of our apartment a little bit, and focus more on ministry.

Me with my husband and mom in all my hospital gown glory!

More good news is that we were finally able to reach Medishare today, which is not insurance but a missionary sharing program that we use in place of insurance. We have an annual household portion that we pay and at this point, it looks like they will be paying 100% of the costs after that amount, so this is another HUGE answer to prayer! We have never had to actually use the program before and were a little unsure how it worked. We do, however, have a lot of work ahead of us. We have to translate every receipt, get it as itemized, detailed, and coded as possible and then mail it all in. Not looking forward to that mess of paperwork. Good thing mom is here to help! 

Every morning around 7 is the nurse change. The night nurses say goodbye and fill in the new nurses on my i.v. status, pill status (I take anywhere from 12-20 pills a day!), blood pressure, etc. They’re all such sweet ladies! I was actually able to have an encourging conversation with one lady who wants to get involved with serving at The Refuge Project. She was super excited about it and only works 2 shifts a week (the lady in blue) so that she can use the rest of her time to serve God! Can’t wait to get to know her better!
Prayer Updates:

• My blood pressure is still high. I had to sleep with the arm band on, and it would go off every hour in the night. Currently it’s 146/90, and they started me on medicine today to help lower it. Pray that the Lord would lower it so my doctors won’t worry so much! 
• The swelling in my lungs has gone down a little, I think – I can breathe a little deeper than the day before. 
• I would love to ask you all to pray for the next steps. Life will look much different when I leave the hospital and though I won’t go into detail yet, mostly because I don’t know, I am starting to think about that. My emotions and thoughts are running wild, and as the doctor said, I need to reign them in and think about today and my kidneys, and not think about what is to come yet. But, of course, that is difficult when the endless questions are looming in front of me. 

I don’t know how many people are praying, but I know it is into the 100s and I am just so thankful. All day long I have had visitors who have been lifting me before the Father. Life isn’t worth living without friends like that, ya know? SO grateful for you all. Thanks for being beside me.