I’m being held hostage by a thermometer. It read 99.2 earlier, but now it reads 99.5. Do I look up the HTML symbol for degrees? No.

So if I did happen to be experiencing an episode of rejection, this would be mean what exactly? Let’s see…

Acute rejection may begin as early as one week after transplantation (as opposed to hyperacute rejection, which is immediate). The risk of acute rejection is highest in the first three months after transplantation. However, acute rejection can also occur months to years after transplantation. A single episode of acute rejection is not a cause for concern if recognized and treated promptly, and rarely leads to organ failure. But recurrent episodes are associated with chronic rejection (see below).

Acute rejection occurs to some degree in all transplants (except those between identical twins) unless the immune response is altered through the use of immunosuppressive drugs. It is caused by mismatched HLA, which are present on all cells of the body. There are a large number of different alleles of each HLA, so a perfect match between all HLA in the donor tissue and the recipient’s body is extremely rare.

Tissues such as the kidney or the liver which are highly vascularized (rich in blood vessels), are often the earliest victims of acute rejection. In fact, episodes of acute rejection occur in around 10-30% of all kidney transplants, and 50 to 60% of liver transplants. Damage to the endothelial lining of blood vessels is an early predictor of irreversible acute transplant rejection.

Yada yada yada…

I popped some acetaminophen a short time ago…let’s see if it’s helped…99.4…maybe I’ll just go to sleep and be back to my usual frigid 96.9 in the morning…

Oh, and when I posted the pic of my surgical bandages, which did for no good reason in the first place, I actually didn’t realize that the incision curved downward and was much bigger. It is not a pretty sight. I promise I will not post that.

I miss my pets…

And what am I going to do with the rest of my life…that’s the big question…assuming my temp doesn’t hit 100, I need to figure this out…it’s time…

This has been a ridiculous past week. Like I’ve been saying, I would be positively ecstatic, but the downside to experiencing rejection is actually so much worse than horrible dialysis routine that all I can muster is a gingerly optimism. (Can gingerly be used as an adjective? Indeed, it can.) Yes, a gingerly optimism….

99.2°. Good enough…