Dr. Sandeep Guleria of Apollo Hospital New Delhi explaining benefits & care that comes with Kidney transplant.
Earliest signs of Kidney failure are, the first that you notice you get up more frequently at night to pass urine. You will also notice that you get tired more often. You feel a lot of fatigue, you get a bit of anemia, your appetite goes down and you may start vomiting frequently because the poisons in your body are too much.
When does a kidney Transplant patient needs dialysis?
Remember what does a Kidney do? It takes the poisons out of your body. It makes blood and strengthens your bones also controls your blood pressure. You need dialysis when the poisons in your body are so much that they are going to harm your body very badly which means your puffed up.
You are having a problem in breathing you have a high potassium and you are unable to do our usual activity’s. So when you have all this and you are having a problem in breathing you should actually consult a local doctor and move for dialysis.
Most people would say that you should get dialysis in a dialysis center because getting dialysis at home can be an comfortable and inconvenient, also you need a trained dialysis technician or a nurse to be with you at the time of dialysis.
Remember during Dialysis the machine pulls out our blood, cleans it out and then puts it back in. So you can have low blood pressure. Some people can have vomiting, so you need to be careful that dialysis is well done and is best done in the hospital, so If you are planning for a transplant there is no doubt that the best option if your fit to receive a Kidney transplant is a kidney transplant. If your fit, you’re active you don’t have referral vascular disease, you don’t have cancer, you have a good heart.
There is no doubt the best option for you is to go for a transplant. If we take a hundred patients and put them on dialysis, we take a hundred and transplant them those on dialysis don’t live long, patient with transplant live longer. It gives you a better quality of life. You can go back to work. You can go back to you usual job. Most of our transplant patients have become fathers, lots have become mothers so you live an absolutely normal life.
It is easier for us to transplant you, if the blood group of the donor and you is the same. However with the advent of newer medicines in plasma exchange we can also do what is called an ABO incompatible Transplant which means the transplant is between different blood groups.
The cost will be a little bit higher because of the Injection called Lituximum and plasma exchanges and use of a filter but its possible and we do it all the time.
Its important to remember that the most important person on transplant its not you its the donor and only if you assure the donor they will be alright on one Kidney we will take the kidney.
What are results after Kidney Transplant?
Well if you look a transplant patients and you transplant a hundred patients today, at the end one year about 97 are doing well and at the end of 5 years about 80 to 85 are doing well, not everybody does well with a transplants. Some patients rejects the kidneys and go back to dialysis, so how you will do is best determined by your tests.
The complications that can occur after a transplant are usually two, one is rejection which means your body doesn’t like the kidney and starts fighting with it, and the other of course is that you get a bad infection which some times can be fetal.
You can have some mild surgical complications like a wound infection a leak of urine or very very rarely a thrombosis of the artery that is supplying the kidney, but for most people it is important that after a transplant you consult your transplant team on a regular basis because they will have to take care of the rejections and the infections that are known to occur.
Having said this after 3 or 4 months everything stabilizes the medicines are down and everything is hunky dory for quite a long long time.
Post operatively its very rare for a patient to need dialysis. He/she only needs dialysis if the kidney doesn’t work and for that he/she might need dialysis support for some more time before the kidney kicks in of course if imminently after the transplant. You have a bad rejection you may also need dialysis support till we are able too treat the rejection and make the kidney recover from that rejection.
Post Kidney Transplant Care
Post transplant you need be careful you must drink clean water, have clean food ensure that you lead a slightly restricted social life. You meet less people, avoid crowded places and take your medicine regularly. Its also imperative that you consult your transplant team on a regular basis.
You can consult the best kidney Transplant Hospital
Dr. Sandeep Guleria of Apollo New Delhi
In the COVID-19 era, we don’t think transplant patients need more medicines, in fact most of our kidney transplant patients have done well if they follow what is called a COVID appropriate behaviour, which means they wear masks, they practice hand sanitation and they use social distancing, they also must take there medicines regularly.
Kidney Transplant patients are strongly advised to take the COVID vaccination including the booster dose because they know that COVID can be quite serious in the immune suppressed patients.
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