Someone is being tested at Mayo now

I just got off the phone with Mayo. It sounds like someone is there for testing now. Obviously they wouldn’t tell me who it was or how the tests were going. They have their selection committee meeting every Wednesday at noon. The potential donor should get a call from Kay that afternoon about the results. If that goes well, the donor can contact me, and we can try to schedule a surgery. Hopefully this goes better than the last time.

Also, a big thank you to everyone who has called Mayo. It sounds like about another 10 people have called since we launched this site. That’s really awesome!

Thanks to everyone who helped create this site!

Now that people are visiting the site, I need to take a minute to thank everyone who helped with it.

I really appreciate the help and support of my friends and colleagues at FindLaw: Amanda, Craig, Christi, Michael, Josh,  Josie,  Juliette, Kathy, Paul, Pete, Ryan and Tim. Beyond helping with the site, everyone at work has been super supportive, and the management has been incredibly flexible when it comes to when, how, and where I work. I’m very lucky to be surrounded by people like that.

I also want to thank Jill Evenocheck and Breanne Doroff from the Minnesota branch of the National Kidney Foundation. They were a huge help with the reference information on the site. They are obviously passionate about preventing kidney disease and helping people who suffer from it.

Thanks, everyone!

Quick update

I just wanted to quickly mention that dialysis continues to go fine. The insurance issues seem to be sorted out for now.

A frustrating conversation with Mayo offered some good news

I had a moderately frustrating conversation with Mayo last week. I got conflicting information from different people there about how well I match with people who have already volunteered to donate to me. The good news is that it seems like there are at least a couple more workable possibilities. Another person was scheduled to go to Rochester for testing, but I asked Kay to work on scheduling someone else. After the best donor in the pool feel through, they scheduled my aunt (I know this from talking to my aunt, not Mayo). Unfortunately, she’s a lot older than me, and it’s likely that a younger donor’s kidney would last a lot longer. We talked about maybe doing a paired exchange with my aunt’s kidney so that we could trade for a younger one. That seemed reasonable until I asked if the other one or two decent matches in my pool were closer to my age. It turns out they were. Mayo had scheduled my aunt to come in because she was really motivated (thanks, Jean!), but I told Kay that it doesn’t make any sense to try to trade a kidney from my aunt when there are equally good, younger candidates who have volunteered to donate directly to me. As I said, I’d rather have a young kidney from someone who is merely willing to donate than an older kidney from someone who is absolutely psyched to donate. Kay’s going to try to schedule someone else. I was at least glad to hear that someone else was scheduled. I still sort of have the impression that they aren’t moving with the sense of urgency I’d like, but at least progress being made.

I also want to briefly mention that dialysis has been going okay so far in April. In fact, I haven’t had any trouble with the needles since my fistulagram, even though they didn’t find anything to fix during it.

I need to call my insurance company again since they keep denying dialysis claims because they think I’m eligible for Medicare, even though I’ve already told them three times (via mail and phone) that I’m not because I haven’t worked the required number of quarters according to the Social Security Administration. Ugh.