The latest

Pat and I met with Dr. Douglas Hanto at Beth Israel Deaconess in Boston yesterday. He is Chief of the Transplant team and was chosen by my general surgeon to perform this surgery. We spent almost an hour with him and walked out of his office feeling very confident with our decision to sign the surgical consent form and move forward with him and his team. He asked us the right questions and he listened and responded when we asked questions. We were very comfortable with him and felt that he definitely has my best interests in hand and knew that what he was signing on for was not a typical auto-transplant procedure. He has not treated any cases of appendiceal cancer, but since he is a transplant surgeon that’s not unusual, especially since this cancer doesn’t tend to attack the kidneys, liver, or other organs that usual require transplants. However, he had done his research and knew that it was almost unheard of for this cancer to appear inside of an organ without penetrating from the outside.

He’ll be bringing a urologist onto the team and once they both view all of my CT scans and check their schedules we’ll get the surgery date. Right now we are talking about next week. We don’t waste time around here. I’ve officially notified work and Friday, February 24 will be my last in office day for at least 6 weeks. I’ll be spending most of next week preparing for the surgery – both mentally and physically (pre-testing, meeting with the urologist, checking out the transplant ward, etc.) He estimated about 5 hours for the surgery and 5-7 days in the hospital. Since there is no bowel involvement, I actually believe that I may be out of the hospital in 7 days. Then I’ll spend at least 4 weeks recovering at home. Dr. Hanto has tentatively decided to use my current incision as his point of entry (that zipper idea is sounding better and better, though I will get another inch or two tummy tuck). While most kidney transplants are done through the back in my case there is a lot of work to be done up front preparing the abdomen for the kidney, so he felt this was best. He’ll go in and remove scar tissue and decide if the kidney is going to be placed in the lower right abdomen or the lower left. He said accessing my kidney from the front won’t be a problem because I’m so thin (guess there are advantages to my weight loss…)

I will give more details about our meeting in a later post – just wanted everyone to know that we’ve made some progress.