It's the Creatine Level
More information has now been revealed. My most recent blood tests show that my creatine level, which I had never heard of, is at some number that calls for a closer look. So that is why I have to go to see a nephrologist in distant Charlottesville.
Sites online say that the creatine level is a good indicator of how well the kidneys are working.
Long ago G., my good X-ray technician neighbor and friend up the road, provided me with a very graphic and useful verbal picture of what the kidneys do. He said to picture the pair of them as filters, sort of like rat wire but of a much, much finer mesh, that prevents bad things from entering your liver via your blood, and instead they dump those substances into your urine and so safely out of your body. But if your blood pressure gets too high, it breaks a certain amount of that mesh and allows too much of the unwanted stuff to pass through to places where it is not wanted.
So creatine is one of those undesirables, a collection of molecules created in the muscles.
As I have never engaged in bodybuilding or in anything else even remotely approaching that ridiculous activity, I don't know what I did to have too high a creatine level. Nor do I know yet what that number is, but one of the first and easiest suspects is other medications, such as motrin and ibuprofen. I don't take either, though I do take several other meds, for high blood pressure and glaucoma.
I also don't know what lies ahead with this. But, to borrow M.L. King Jr.'s memorable phrase that he used in an entirely different context, this can't have the "fierce urgency of the moment," because my appointment with the kidney doctor is not till a whole month from now, on September 10. And I also comfort myself by noting that I don't feel any pain from my kidneys. I urinate a lot, but I was thinking that that could be because I drink a lot of tea, juice, V-8, and several other kinds of liquids all day long, though not alcohol or plain water.
This makes me happy that once again pure providence has done its job, so that kidneys have never been a part of what the two women who provided the lion's share of what I've had to eat through my days, first my mother and then my wife, never had one thought of putting kidneys on the menu. The closest I came is that, if I remember correctly, Leopold Bloom, one of the two main characters in a book that I have picked up time and time again to try to penetrate its mysteries, James Joyce's Ulysses, is, in the book's very first pages, savoring the prospect of a morning repast of boiled kidneys.
Sites online say that the creatine level is a good indicator of how well the kidneys are working.
Long ago G., my good X-ray technician neighbor and friend up the road, provided me with a very graphic and useful verbal picture of what the kidneys do. He said to picture the pair of them as filters, sort of like rat wire but of a much, much finer mesh, that prevents bad things from entering your liver via your blood, and instead they dump those substances into your urine and so safely out of your body. But if your blood pressure gets too high, it breaks a certain amount of that mesh and allows too much of the unwanted stuff to pass through to places where it is not wanted.
So creatine is one of those undesirables, a collection of molecules created in the muscles.
As I have never engaged in bodybuilding or in anything else even remotely approaching that ridiculous activity, I don't know what I did to have too high a creatine level. Nor do I know yet what that number is, but one of the first and easiest suspects is other medications, such as motrin and ibuprofen. I don't take either, though I do take several other meds, for high blood pressure and glaucoma.
I also don't know what lies ahead with this. But, to borrow M.L. King Jr.'s memorable phrase that he used in an entirely different context, this can't have the "fierce urgency of the moment," because my appointment with the kidney doctor is not till a whole month from now, on September 10. And I also comfort myself by noting that I don't feel any pain from my kidneys. I urinate a lot, but I was thinking that that could be because I drink a lot of tea, juice, V-8, and several other kinds of liquids all day long, though not alcohol or plain water.
This makes me happy that once again pure providence has done its job, so that kidneys have never been a part of what the two women who provided the lion's share of what I've had to eat through my days, first my mother and then my wife, never had one thought of putting kidneys on the menu. The closest I came is that, if I remember correctly, Leopold Bloom, one of the two main characters in a book that I have picked up time and time again to try to penetrate its mysteries, James Joyce's Ulysses, is, in the book's very first pages, savoring the prospect of a morning repast of boiled kidneys.
posted by Carl (aka Sofarsogoo) | 6:23 AM
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