Saturday, March 24, 2012

Post-Transplant: Apathy and Depression

As discussed at the start of this chapter, mood swings are common in the aftermath of such a complex medical procedure.  You can mitigate these by prescribed medications, but the best medicine is watching your forward progress.  Lethargy, depression and anxiety can add to your physical symptoms, so don’t underestimate the impact they might have.  Difficulty in communication due to the fuzzy brain syndrome can easily play a part as well.  Use your daily journal to see what impacts you in a positive and negative way and try to modify your behavior so that there are more positives than negatives.


As with most of your physical symptoms, over time these emotional upheavals will lessen as well.  However, it's certainly been my experience that as each milestone deadline approaches I get more and more anxious.  The tests are all done one week, and reviewed the next, so that one week waiting to hear the results is particularly difficult.  This is something you just have to learn to live with, since your team is not going to become even cautiously optimistic about a long-term cure until the 5-year milestone is successfully passed.  The next page discusses these milestones tests.

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