No matter what is going on with my health, we never get far away from worrying about my kidneys. Low blood protein last winter raised some alarms. And I just had my third episode of significant and persistent fluid swelling that landed me in ER, which was undoubtedly triggered by infection but things don’t usually get that bad with simple infection. In most people. But my body never follows the rules of most people anyway. Each time, we put me on antibiotics, and I lose 5-10 pounds in a few days as the fluid swelling goes away.
So we’ll check my labs again, and my doctors will puzzle through what’s up with all this. I was at NIH a couple of months after my first fluid swelling/infection episode, and they couldn’t figure it out, and I’ve seen two nephrologists and a urologist locally, and they are at a loss. With my hydration disorder, nothing about my kidney-related labs looks like it would in someone with normal hydration patterns.
As one of my late relatives used to say, if you’re going to have medical problems, get something common. Having rare conditions is the pits!
