Planning for a New NAS…

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Granted, this is an upgrade that probably won’t happen for a couple of years, but as my current environment chugs away at adding the first of two new parity drives to upgrade from 14 TB to 20 TB, it’s starting to become clear that this NAS that has been supporting our home streaming and hoarding efforts for the last six years is nearing the end of the line for a couple of reasons…

First and foremost, I just recently replaced the entire motherboard after this giant headache from three months ago that never truly got resolved. The old one had both a CMOS issue where even a new battery wouldn’t retain the BIOS settings and the BMC refused to respond, which is needed for any firmware updates, so I finally spent about a hundred bucks on eBay for a used one and after about an hour to swap everything over, my excess fan noise went away and the whole thing was stable again … for now!

Now second of all … this array is starting to get pretty big.

Ten years ago, having just started playing with Plex the previous fall, I had 20 TB of disks in use total. This year for early Black Friday sales, I picked three new drives up from Best Buy that each have 20 TB of space available!

Plus, looking at my storage array as it stands today, I’ve got a total of 210 TB spread across 18 data disks and 2 parity disks, and all but about 8 TB is in use. So this upgrade, after juggling around my parity disks, will put me at right about 260 TB of data disks, and with my existing chassis (a Dell C2100 and MD1000 disk shelf) limited to 27 disks in total, I’ll have room for about six more until I’m completely maxed out from a hardware standpoint and nearly maxed out from an OS standpoint (Unraid’s limit is 28 data + 2 parity)…

…which if we’re being honest, is my bigger concern because I know that as my array continues to grow and disks get bigger, parity restores continue to take longer and longer, which adds the risk of having additional failures while waiting for the first restore to finish.

In the grand scheme of things, I’d love to see this evolve into a 500 TB or even 1 PB like something out of Linus Tech Tips and I think given enough time, it’s probably possible, however at the same time I also have to think about longevity and the things I can do to protect all of the work that has gone into building an archive this big and making it useful to friends and family to boot!

It makes me wonder if I’m going to eventually have to switch from Unraid over to TrueNAS, which is more capable of housing HUGE amounts of data whereas while Unraid still supports a quarter of a petabyte as I’ll soon be hosting in the near future, they’ve always said that their target audience isn’t for enterprises needing extremely large storage options. Even among power users, I’d still consider having a petabyte of storage at home to be an extreme option…

So here’s the comparison as I see it today, admittedly not knowing a ton about TrueNAS:

UnraidTrueNAS
Disk Quantity Limit28 data + 2 parity disksonly limited by other hardware (e.g. processing power, backplane, HBA, etc…)
Redundancy Options1 or 2 parity disks for entire arrayneed to learn more here, but I believe ZFS allows for multiples with vdevs and pools

Example:
vdev1 – ten 20 TB disks, 2 parity drives
vdev2 – eight 14 TB disks, 2 parity drives
vdev3 – 6 10 TB disks, 2 parity drives
pool containing all three vdevs – 372 TB, 6 parity drives
Disk Size Limitmix and match – no limitvdev must contain disks of the same size, can create additional vdevs for other sizes
How Data is Storedindividual files are stored on a single disk

Result – losing a disk only loses files stored on that disk, not whole array; only disk containing files actively streaming need to be spinning		files are striped across all disks in vdev

Result – much faster read/write speeds, but losing a disk loses the whole vdev; all disks in vdev need to be spinning to stream files from that vdev

I still have a lot of research to do, namely if I can make TrueNAS mimic how Unraid stores data which I think is pretty handy, despite how neat it would be to see those faster speeds. Additionally, I can’t help but wonder if limiting how much my disks are normally spinning has helped to prolong their lifespans, as my oldest disks are currently 7 years old whereas 3 – 5 years seems to be the typical average. In reality, most of the time only a few drives out of the twenty in my array are spun up and in the future, I think I can do some further tweaking with the cache drives to hold newer files longer so that they won’t even get pushed over to the array until users have had several weeks to watch them.

I’m still hoping that we get to build a new house at some point and ideally this upgrade would take place around the same time so that it would be moving into a newer and more accommodating server rack in a dedicated room that isn’t my bedroom closet and boasts better air conditioning and noise dampening to boot! It can be hard to judge how often new drives are actually needed because I often forget to write down my totals each year, so we’ll see if this newest 50 TB lasts for more than 2026 or if I find myself adding more again around this same time next year!

Officially Past the Three Month Mark!

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That’s right, I’ve had my sister-in-law’s kidney in me now for a hair over three months and sadly it’s just about time for me to go back to work, but the good news is that said kidney is doing swell and as far as I can tell, I’ve been doing everything mostly right – could still stand for a better sleep schedule and more protein in my diet (120g is a lot of protein!) – but otherwise no big scares aside from having to correct some meds to better control my blood pressure.

Here’s a glimpse at my latest labs – you can find some definitions that I shared back on this blog post…

Back on Sept. 24th, my last value for Creatinine was 1.5 mg/dL.

Back on Sept. 24th, my last value for GFR was 58 mL/min/1.73m2, so a nice increase nearly into the range of normal kidney function there!

P.S. No idea why it says FISH on this test – as far as I know, no fish were associated with testing my blood, but who knows – doctors can be sneaky sometimes…

Keep in mind that Tacrolimus is an immunosuppressive drug, meaning that it weakens my immune system to prevent it from attacking my transplanted kidney because it thinks its a foreign body that shouldn’t be there! In the weeks following my transplant, this got as high as 15 and 20 because the drug dosages start out high and then gradually get reduced. The med driving this started at 8 mg daily and is now down to 3 mg a day – it may go down a tiny bit more to see if I can get into the sixes, but right now I’m pretty close to where they want me.

And potassium is a funny one because I’ve taken pills for it for a while with it being too low, yet more than once this spring it put me in the hospital because it was too high (think above 8 mmol/L, which is when I would feel dizzy whenever I tried to walk and alternated between sweating and chills with my fevers. Not fun, and also apparently pretty dangerous because high potassium can interfere with the heart’s rhythm and lead to heart attacks.

This year I’ve found more than once just how shocking it can be to hear afterwards that, “You know, you were closer to dying than you probably realize…”

Thankfully after some digging, one of my doctors added a new pill to test a theory that seems to have improved the way my body is absorbing my potassium pills, so that’s some good news!

If anything, I can certainly say that this whole process has made me appreciate not only how fragile the human body really is, but even more so the level of attention that my team of doctors has to pay to dozens of stats like these to make sure I’m heading in the right direction and to do their best to catch anything wrong before it goes from bad to worse.

As of this moment, they’ve got me taking 22 pills a day, with blood work roughly once a week and my next follow-up visit about a month since my last one. Before the transplant, I was taking less than 10 a day – mostly vitamins and various blood pressure meds.

And although there are a handful that will continue to reduce either as I get further out from my transplant or my health improves to the point where some aren’t needed anymore, some I’ll be taking for the rest of my life … assuming that I’m lucky enough to keep this kidney going that long! That’s one of my top priorities at this point:

  • Raise my boys into honorable young men.
  • Keep my wife happy and wanting to stay married to me.
  • Put enough food on the table and maintain a roof over our heads.
  • Take the utmost care of this new kidney like the priceless gift that it is.

So I see a lot of changes still coming in the months and years to come, just as I already have in the last three months since they cut me open and one of my lungs collapsed but thankfully everything was ok and I came to a few hours later with a third kidney stuffed inside me! If I’m lucky, I’m about halfway through my life and as intriguing and fun as it can be to reflect back on the last 45 years and what went wrong and what went right, I’m also more and more thinking about my next 45 years and how I want to spend the rest of my time…

…in addition to how I don’t want to spend the rest of my time!

Of course, that’s a story for another thousand or so blog posts to come in my future, but right now at 1:34am on a Saturday night, three months after I received a new kidney and a new lease on life, I feel grateful, and content, and optimistic, and hopeful, and loved, and the game plan now is to keep all of those positive feelings going as other stressors in my life ebb and flow as they usually do.

I’ll try to post more about some of my new perspectives on life once I’ve had a chance to wrap my arms around them myself. 😉

Goodbye, Grex – I Hadn’t Used You in 28 Years Anyways…

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The other day I very randomly stumbled upon one of my earliest homes on the Internet, only to find that apparently it had shutdown, like, two and a half years ago.

This honestly kind of surprised me because frankly, I’m surprised that it even stayed afloat as long as it had!

Spoiler Alert – Here’s a post that I wrote eight years ago both surprised and impressed that it was still online in 2017!

Don’t get me wrong – Grex holds a special place in my heart as one of the first Internet accounts that I held on someone else’s computer, and it was fun meeting people from all over but mostly Michigan to chat about video games and role playing games and whatever other nerdy stuff yours truly was into between the ages of roughly 14 and 17. Nowadays, there’s really no need for a place like Grex when you’ve got forums like Reddit and chatrooms like Discord and social media like Facebook that has managed to persuade grandparents into coming online … even when maybe they shouldn’t, purely for reasons of political expression and a lack of the ability to not share every last thought that comes through their heads online…

But then again, look at me here – I’ve been writing this blog pretty much since the web went graphical and have amassed 1.1 million words read by nearly dozens of people, so I guess that I’m not much better!

Not to mention, nowadays a service like Grex could pretty easily run off of any of a number of servers in my closet, or even on something like AWS for next to nothing. It started as a hobby by computer geeks my senior and ran until it was years or even decades beyond obsolete. As much as it pains me to think of all of the web links that have gone dead either because websites went offline or upgraded and scrapped their old content, or even when their owners pass away with no one left who understands how to keep them running … the circle of life is more like the line chart of life when it comes to Internet sites.

If you’re lucky, you get archived so that people like me can go back in time via the Wayback Machine every now and then for a glimpse at what things were like before social media and ads and spam took over the Internet. Ironically for Grex, they barely had a web presence because the web itself was barely a thing at that point, but since nobody thankfully archived our telnet connections, instead back in 1996 Grex’s homepage looked a little something like this…

I’m pretty sure I had found it years earlier via a gopher search through one of the state universities that we accessed simply from a Host: prompt after dialing in to one of our local library’s modems, whereas many who lived downstate in Ann Arbor, MI actually dialed in directly to Grex as their gateway to the greater Internet in its infancy.

We’ve come a long ways in the last 30 years. It makes me wonder how much of it I’ll still recognize once another 30 come and go!

Or if I’ll even still be able to see the screen without super bi-focals at this rate!

Revisiting Magic via Final Fantasy…

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Earlier this year, I found myself getting sucked back into the world of Magic: The Gathering by way of Final Fantasy when they released a set meant to honor every single game in the series!

Despite not having done anything with Magic since high school and in fact selling off my most expensive cards when the twins were born to open their college funds.

Side Note: It’s a little crazy that the most expensive card I sold in that batch about seven years ago got me about $250 (Revised Underground Sea) and today that same card goes for over a thousand dollars! Oops…

Anyways, after picking up a handful of cards on eBay just to check them out, I eventually decided to start collecting them myself – first a few at a time from eBay sellers and eventually stumbling upon Card Kingdom, which was actually the same place I sold those cards to years ago … and boy, did it get addictive from there! I don’t want to admit to how many orders I placed from my hospital bed in the first week I was recovering from my transplant, but needless to say it was several! 😉

As I write this post, I have about half of all of the Final Fantasy set – originally it was about 300 cards and I was only 9 away from being done, but then I decided to add the Commander series to my list, too, which brought the total up to 338 of 683 cards, which mind you is excluding all of the stupid expensive ones because this is already expensive enough as it is without some of them being $800 or more!

Anyways, I thought it would be fun to wrap up this post with a handful of my favorite cards from the Final Fantasy games that I did play, beginning with the one that started it all…

Final Fantasy
Final Fantasy IV
Final Fantasy VI
Final Fantasy VII
The Infamous Crystals

Seven Weeks In – So Far, So Good!

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Mind you, I actually meant to write this post a week ago at what would’ve been the six-week mark, but what can I say? Despite being off of work and not having any real responsibilities other than recover, I just didn’t have the time. Or something…

Anywho, seven weeks ago today, I had my kidney transplant and overall, things have been going pretty great!

My labs have shown continual improvement, to the point where I skipped ahead a lot in how often I had to visit the clinic for follow-ups last month, with me just last week switching from weekly appointments to bi-weekly appointments where I can get my lab work done a few miles from my house instead of driving all the way downtown on my off weeks. It’s also been nice that the last two or three follow-ups had my doctors saying, “It’s doing the best that it has so far!” for multiple weeks in a row!

We’ve changed my meds a little bit, but nothing too crazy. At one point I had a bit of a tremor in my hands as a result of my Tacrolimus level being a little too high, but we lowered my dosage and it went away pretty quick.

I also had to deal with some drama between pharmacies because apparently my insurance wants me to fill certain meds with their pharmacy to save money instead of just letting the Transplant Clinic fill everything, and that was a pain to sort out … but it’s done now.

For those who enjoy stats like me, here’s what a couple of my key lab results have looked like since my surgery…

Creatinine is a waste product in your blood from the processing of protein and regular muscle breakdown, which is why people with kidney issues have to limit the amount of protein we consume because our kidneys aren’t doing a good job of filtering it out anymore. Dialysis does a little better, but remember that dialysis is a few times a week for a few hours a day (12 hours/week total for me) whereas healthy kidneys are normally working 24×7.

GFR is a measure for overall kidney function and one of the main determining factors in how far along one’s kidney disease has progressed as well as when it’s necessary to begin dialysis. I believe I started when my GFR fell below 10, and now you can see that it’s steadily improving compared to this chart below:

So lab-wise, I’m doing great, and quite frankly, physically I’m feeling pretty good, too! The fatigue I felt in my weeks after surgery has mostly subsided and my pain is mostly reduced some acute pain when I roll over on my kidney side in bed. I do have some numbness in my right thigh below where they had to cut through a bunch of nerves, which I’m told could heal in six months or not, so we’ll see on that one.

As for my scars, they’ve basically all closed up to the point where I was actually able to go swimming with the boys for the first time in, like, two years, which I’m super happy about because it’s something that I’ve really been missing! It does take a little extra effort standing up because I think I’ve lost a fair bit of muscle along the way, plus my existing kidney are pretty heavy … but it sounds like we’re going to deal with them sometime next year, so that’ll be a relief once those monstrosities are out of my body for good!

I’ve slowly starting pushing myself to exercise just a little, mainly consisting of laps around our loop in the neighborhood in the evenings. It’s not much, but I’m not really supposed to do anything more than walking anyways, so I figure if I can do a little at a time each day, that’s pretty good given the circumstances.

Last week I also got my stent removed that ran from my new kidney to my bladder. It was not fun and I do not recommend through the penis as a method to remove things from the body! But by the end of the weekend, my urination sensitivity had settled down back to normal, so now I’m peeing an appropriate amount, but not RIGHT NOW like my body had been otherwise demanding of me to some less than savory results…

So in summary, things are going really, really well, and from what I’ve heard the same goes for my donor, so that’s good. I’m at the point where I honestly don’t really think about it most of the time, so the new kidney has done a good job of assimilating with my other organs despite being the reason why everything is more cramped in there than it was a couple of months ago!

It’s been slow and steady, but I’m trying to use this recovery time to make some changes that I’ve needed in my life – we’ll go into all of that another day – but for now I’ll just say that it’s been refreshing to be able to focus my attention on the things and people that I truly care about, and in a way I do look at this period as sort of a new outlook on life with opportunities aplenty. My life is worth it, and now seems like as good a time as any to act on those impulses…

You Have No Idea How Bad I Have to Pee Right Now!!!

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The thing is, neither do I because my body is apparently playing post-transplant tricks with me in the form of urinary urges that have literally had me running to the toilet at least half a dozen times an hour!

Fortunately, it’s already known – and actually expected – what the issue is, as a stent is placed in the ureter connecting my new kidney to my bladder to ensure that the path for urine remains clear as my body adjusts to the new organ. Now that I’m officially a month out, we’re about ready to have it removed – I actually have it scheduled for next week, which unfortunately now can’t come fast enough because my understanding is that as I move around, that stent is floating back and forth in said ureter which has become a constant source of irritation as it moves.

For example, I took Christopher to Target this evening for a few things and I literally had to stop to try and pee three separate times!

Walking around that entire store was definitely an exercise in endurance because deep down, usually my mind would know that it was just an urge with nothing behind it, yet with every step the sensation either presses on or even surges upward until the worry of peeing myself in the middle of Target finally drove me rushing to the nearest restroom to spend thirty seconds not peeing before returning to the cart for another hundred feet of torment.

It’s been like that for the past couple of days, with me making a frantic stop at the bathroom down the hallway anytime I’m either going to or from my office. All day long. Really frustrating because as I continue to heal, I’m trying to do more and more around the house to get things in order while I’m not working, however even just walking from one spot to another in my office can be enough to trigger it.

All in all, admittedly it’s a pretty good problem to have, as it’s completely expected and my kidney continues to perform at the best the doctors have seen it each week, so overall I’m progressing rather nicely and if anything, I’ve actually been recovering a bit ahead of schedule, which is great! Before too long, my pee problems should theoretically be a thing of the past and then I can go back to just being in awe at the sheer volume that I’m peeing now that I have a working kidney that actually does what it’s supposed to!

Things I’m Enjoying Right Now…

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The Good Stuff

  • I recently got back into collecting Magic cards again after about a 27 year gap, and so far it looks like it’s just as addictive as it was back in high school! Except that it’s so easy to buy cards online now, I’m literally getting orders every few days for the half a dozen or so sets that I decided to start with!
  • I also started building this giant Lego Mario set from Bricker Builds, which I bought the instructions to a year or two ago when they were on-sale. It’s a tedious build when you’re acquiring the bricks separately, but buying everything direct is upwards of $1,500 so Bricklink it is! The last thing I did from them was this big Super Mushroom, so it makes only sense that we add something to eat it. 🙂
  • I’m also trying to use this free time that I have to clean up the house in general, which is challenging while I’m in the middle of it but admittedly it still counts as a “good thing” when I’m done.
  • My twins turn 9 years old tomorrow – crazy how the time flies!!!
  • Not working has also been pretty nice, too!

The Challenging Stuff

  • Literally both of our cars are currently having issues. The van is doing this bizarre thing where it randomly turns itself back on after you turn it off, then just toggles the accessories over and over all night long until either the battery dies or it drops low enough to trigger the alarm. Obnoxious either way, and I just know it’s going to cost a fortune if I end up having to take it to the dealership to fix.
  • As for the car, there’s a little plastic pad on the backside of the brake pedal that keeps the brake lights off when you’re not pushing on the pedal and eventually they wear down. I tried replacing it sometime last year but could only get the pad halfway in … and apparently it finally slipped out! There’s no way I can bend to fix it now, so hopefully the mechanic doesn’t gouge us too bad for the five minutes it will take to put in a new one…
  • I still haven’t 100% solved my one server’s issue yet, so it’s running, but it’s very noisy! Even with the CMOS battery replaced, it doesn’t like to reboot without wiping it via the jumper, so at this point it’s either a bad component or the entire board is bad. This is a pain because while it’s technically up right now, it has to go down during the BIOS update I need to make to fix the loud fan controls … and also, I can’t seem to connect to it through the BMC tools to apply the update, either, nor can I apply it via USB. It’s just being a pain in the ass and I’ve been ignoring it in favor of the car issues lately because it’s hot as hell trying to work in that closet anyways and right now I’m out of ideas aside from stripping down all of the components and testing it one at a time, which sounds incredibly tedious.

P.S.

  • My kidney is doing great! I’ll post more about that soon, but no real complaints or issues in that area!!! 🙂

Server Crash!

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Granted, I was probably long overdue for one because I can’t even remember the last time I had to toil away in my server closet / bedroom closet for more than a minute or two, but it sure would’ve been nice to do before or after I was done recovering from my kidney transplant so that I could twist and move to mess with cables and heavy servers in such a manner!

But then again, power outages come at a time when we least expect it, which is basically what happened about a week ago in the early hours of my birthday when we lost electricity for about two hours and when it came back up, my NAS decided that it didn’t want to…

For reference, the server in reference is a Dell PowerEdge C2100 – yes, it’s pretty old, but it gets the job done for now.

My first suspects were all power-related, figuring that maybe a power supply went bad when the electricity came back on or something. I did notice a battery error on one of the UPSes, which was odd because one ran out of juice and the other didn’t, but in hindsight I think that was an unrelated way of reminding me that it’s time to replace the batteries in them – makes sense, considering I bought them back in 2019!

For the longest time, I was at a loss because essentially the lights on the power supplies told me that it was getting power, but a single, non-flashing orange light on the front indicated a hardware failure that prevented booting. I started stumbling through Dell’s troubleshooting guide of unplugging components until I could get it to boot and was about ready to cry when I found a random forum post hinting to try resetting the CMOS via a really tiny jumper that was a pain in the ass to find, and suddenly it booted!

Once!

It spit out all sorts of random errors and sometimes even random characters while it was trying to boot, eventually telling me that it couldn’t find the boot device (which is a USB drive for Unraid) and then went silent again when I killed the power to try a reboot.

After a couple of rounds of resetting the CMOS to work through the various settings changes and watching them disappear shortly thereafter, it clicked that maybe it was the actual CMOS battery that had died, which was correct because once I replaced that … and also plugged back in one of the SATA cables for the backplane for the disks, it started booting fine!

But it still wouldn’t boot into Unraid.

Well, chalk one up to Oops because it turns out that *I* had unplugged the dongle for the USB boot drive when I was trying to locate that CMOS jumper, and although I had replaced it, I guess I must’ve put it in backwards or something because after reorienting it, I was able to go into BIOS and it actually saw the USB as a boot option finally!

So thankfully after a full week of dabbling with this thing a few times a day for as long as I could crouch down in the closet, it’s finally back online and now I just have to endure a 2.5 day parity check because Unraid failed to shutdown nicely when my UPS ran out of battery.

A couple of follow-ups:

  • I need to look into that and make sure all of my servers are set to gracefully shutdown if they switch to UPS power for more than, say, a minute. We get a lot more flickers than actual outages where we are, so that should be the best scenario to shoot for.
  • I also need to replace the batteries in those UPSes … which wouldn’t be so bad at about $25 a piece except that each one contains three batteries!
  • And lastly, but most urgently, I need to verify that the right BIOS is now running because one goofy bug that I encountered when I first got this machine was that the newer BIOSes from Dell didn’t control the fans correctly, thus resulting in it absolutely screaming all of the time, which my wife does not approve of! Backing down to a specific, lower version fixes it, and I even know exactly which one because apparently I made my own forum post when I did it back in 2019, so I need to see whether the resets lost that as well or what.

That said, right now I’m very tired because it’s very hot inside of that closet, especially with one server running at full tilt, so we’ll see what all that involves and how loud it is with the closet door closed to determine whether I get to it tonight or not!

The Ups and Downs of Kidney Transplants

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It’s still kind of weird to think that roughly a week ago, I started off my Wednesday with two (garbage) kidneys and enough anxiety to fill a 50-gallon trash bag, and yet now here we are some 8 days later, a total of three kidneys stuffed in my body, and at least one of them actually works!

It truly was a wild week of ups and downs – kicking things off at the hospital not sure if we were going to have to postpone because I had been carrying a small fever and aches since my final dialysis session two days earlier.

Thankfully, the doctors that oversaw my case ultimately decided that the safest thing for me was to proceed with the transplant, so they did that. I didn’t know until it was behind me and I had woken up that apparently one of my lungs collapsed near the end of the surgery because somehow I got a leak in the cavity outside of it, which filled with enough air to prevent my one lung from being able to re-inflate.

So I woke up in the Trauma ICU with a few extra tubes protruding from my body, including a line literally in my neck, which would’ve been scarier if I wasn’t on so many painkillers at that point!

My first real dose of pain came that day when they wanted me to move from the bed to a chair, and it was easily the worst pain I’ve ever felt in my life. Thankfully, pain-wise I did pretty good from there on out – the next day easily saw it cut in half to a 5 instead of a 10, and soon it really only hurt when I needed to pivot out of the bed. Eventually we did some walking in the hallway with a walker, and another day or two later I was walking without it, the pain now only hitting me when I hit certain positions and I can usually sit in one place without any pain whatsoever.

Along side all of the physical therapy, they also started scrutinizing my oxygen levels because they would be fine while I was walking, but randomly dip when I was just sitting and watching TV. Eventually as the other hoses began to get removed, they narrowed their focus on the O2 and found that it wasn’t hitting the levels necessary for sending me home with oxygen, and eventually after a lack of symptoms we had to say good enough.

I think one of my scariest times was last week when my new kidney hadn’t quite picked up its pace at processing urine and filtering out old toxins yet, to the point where they were considering putting a dialysis catheter back in so that I could go get an emergency session if necessary. Thankfully, my Creatinine and GFR continued to see tiny bumps that were more encouraging, so they said that was no longer necessary, which I was particularly grateful for.

Even today, there were new questions about my heart because I guess it was creating a bizarre waveform while I was sleeping, and only while I was sleeping! The cardiologist finally came by and explained that it wasn’t necessarily good or bad, just odd, which is a good overall summary of my health to date, too.

And so late this afternoon, on day #8 after my transplant surgery, they finally cleared me to go home and gave me a huge binder of information to read along with an even bigger bag of pills that I’ll need to take for the rest of my life in order to keep my new organ from feuding with my cranky body.

Admittedly it’s still really overwhelming, but frankly that’s why I’ve got the next couple of months off from work to adjust to new habits and figure out the best ways of taking care of myself to make this sucker last as long as possible!

Oh yeah, and I also literally go back to the Transplant Clinic three times a week for the next month so they can follow my labs and adjust my meds accordingly, so I still feel like I’m in pretty good hands.

I’m sure I’ll have much more to write in the future as my brain begins to decompress from all of this, so right now I just wanted to cover – it worked, I’m home, and I’m ready for the next mountain that life has for me to climb.

Well, metaphorically, anyways – I’m pretty sure I won’t be climbing anything larger than my bed for the near future while these latest scars in my torso take their time to heal!

Welcome to the next chapter in Scott’s life – here’s hoping that it’s a good one…

Passing Some Time at Dialysis…

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Today is my second to last dialysis treatment before my kidney transplant next week, so I thought I’d try to pass some of my four hours of blood filtering with a random brain dump of thoughts that have crossed my mind recently.

  • How many traffic accidents could be prevented just by people staying in their damn lane?! I see so many people weaving in and out of traffic on our roads, only to save what – half a minute on their travel time??? Your safety and that of everyone else on the road is far more important!
  • Politics is just depressing these days. I’m so tired of seeing what new thing Trump found to destroy on a daily basis.
  • I think so many aspects of our lives would improve if everyone dialed back the judgment of each other. Whether it’s family or co-workers or even strangers at the grocery store, 99% of the people around us don’t know everything going on in our lives or the challenges we’re currently facing, so just chill and give people the benefit of the doubt.
  • In remote work, we have an acronym – API, or Assume Positive Intent – and I think it applies in a lot of areas of our lives, namely when interacting with other people. It’s pretty simple – just don’t assume someone is acting maliciously because things didn’t go the way you expected.
  • I’ve written about it before, but I think this next phase of my life is going to focus a lot on embracing passion as a way to filter out negativity, particularly but not limited to all of the noise online. We only get so much time on this pale, blue dot of ours and I’m tired of wasting any of it on being angry about things that are outside of my control.
  • It’s amazing the variety of people around us who we never really know. Right now in dialysis, I can see one person watching Thor, another watching one of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, and a third watching Friends. And we’re all just trying to get through another session!
  • There’s a lot to be said for “Not yucking someone’s yum.” If somebody enjoys something and it’s not hurting anybody, let them enjoy it. I used to hate country music growing up just because it was the opposite of rock music and it felt like we were supposed to, but now … who really cares?! Just because it’s not what I want to listen to doesn’t mean it sucks and it means a lot to some people just like rock music means a lot to others. Let people enjoy their football or bowling or Dungeons & Dragons or collecting shiny rocks or whatever the case may be – those kinds of passions are what make our lives worthwhile!
  • I’m starting to come around on unnecessary movie sequels for the same reason. I personally don’t care for them, but their existence doesn’t ruin the original that I might’ve loved. Creating a new Ghostbusters movie doesn’t ruin those first two movies that were absolute classics when I was growing up. If you don’t want to watch them, then just don’t watch them…
  • Dialysis, and modern medicine in general, are amazing technological advances … yet I’m not going to miss coming here one bit after next week!
    • P.S. Please remind me of this whenever I grumble about working out instead of having to go to dialysis once I’ve recovered…