Like Roadkill in a White Bucket

It would be an understatement to say a lot has happened since my last post on December 15. I intend to write more narrative-style updates on the last several months because *hairflip* that's how I do things, but I also don't want to wait too long and forget all the minutiae that I relish. I'm coloring outside the lines today and going with a bullet point vibe. Character growth, baybee.

• It's been 1 month, 1 week, and 1 day since Joey got his new liver. 
• He was on the transplant list 134 days and received 5 offer calls.
• Joey needed over 30 units of red blood cells while in the hospital (he needed 14 during surgery specifically). I lost count of how many units of platelets and plasma he went through.
• Joey lost 82 pounds of water weight in the 2 weeks post-transplant.
• Everyone-- everyone-- we interacted with loved my Loungefly Seinfeld backpack. Thanks, Lauren!
• Out of the dozens of nurses and nurse assistants Joey had during his two week stay, only 2 were unpleasant. The others were angels.
• We had a living donor surgery tentatively scheduled for Feb. 21st. Obviously, we didn't need this after all and everyone involved is looking forward to celebrating the occasion with espresso in the future.
• Joey's finally letting his facial hair grow! I've been begging and begging all our marriage for him to have a beard and he's doing it! (He wanted me to add "for now" at the end of this point.)
• Joey is a phenomenal hospital patient. The nurses' only complaint was that he "talks a lot," but otherwise he was always trying to make things easier for them. 
• We got to see a picture of his diseased liver. See title of post for help visualizing it.
• We watched YouTube videos on how to remove Joey's 37 surgical staples, but he preferred that I let the doctor do it instead of doing it with the $7 staple remover recommended by the YouTube prepper. I swear the one at the hospital looked exactly the same though.
• There were so many tears of gratitude while Joey was in the hospital. For a few days in a row, he cried every hour or so, but it was always because he was so happy and felt so fortunate. One time, tears literally shot from his eyes like he was a cartoon character.
• Since being home, I've felt on the verge of tears most times I look at him. I think it's the beard.

We got calls 3, 4, and 5 within ten days of each other. We got the 5th call around 11:00 am on Saturday, January 29 and he was taken to the operating room ten hours later.

We are so so so so grateful to have this (embarrassingly cliché) new lease on life. I have to keep telling myself that this really happened and it is a big deal so clichés be damned! 

His watch fits again!

Thank you everyone for your support through thinking of us while donating blood, Facebook responses, messages, cards, baked goods, meals, floral arrangements, edible arrangements, gifts & care packages, Crocs (yes, Crocs) and waves from the window. We don't ever want to take for granted how we feel right now and how fortunate we are to have you in our community, to have jobs with good insurance, and to have been sustained by God this far.

That's toOoOoO many pastries!

For my birthday a couple years ago, I asked Joey to write me a letter sharing his memories of our year in Kentucky. Don't be afraid to explicitly ask for the gifts you want, y'all, because he really came through! I'll give you a peek at it.

"Admittedly, we will always have places where we need to grow, but I figure we have about 10 more years until my liver explodes, so there's still time."

A new liver has been on our radar for a while. While it didn't technically "explode," it also didn't last "10 more years." We're hopeful that with the gift of this new one, we can look forward to the future, cherish the time we have, and stop using the word 'bilirubin' so often.

And now, a word from our spoonie: Does this mean I'm not a spoonie anymore? 😬

Joey would like me to note that this post makes our liver journey seem very final. It's not. He's doing so much better (he feels better now 5 weeks out of major surgery than he did over the entire last year), but he's got new challenges (#immunosuppression in a COVID world). He also still has Ulcerative Colitis, which thankfully has been stable for a while now. I wanted to have a mostly happy post since the last few updates have been heavy. Rest assured, things are exponentially less heavy in the Nick house, but this experience is life altering and we're just at the beginning of our own new normal.