cknapp319

My name is Catherine Knapp - I am 48 years old. I have Hashimoto Thyroiditis. I have had it for about 17 years. It has been extremely hard for me to lose weight and keep it off. My thyroid jumps and then bottoms out and then I gain. My son has a rare chronic fatal illness that has no cure called Wegener's granulomatosis. It presented with eye, lung, heart, chronic kidney and Jr RA. He has had it since he was 9 years old. He is now 18. Over the last 2 years his illness started taking a turn with his kidney function rapidly decreasing. We decided that since we both share the same blood type that I would give him one of my kidneys. Unfortunately my weight was preventing that from happening. I asked my primary care doctor for a referral and she told me about a metabolic doctor at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. I saw her and explained my plans and she referred me to Dr Eric Hungness for gastric surgery.

Between him and I we decided to go with the gastric sleeve. My reasons were so that I could keep my kidneys healthy and let my body absorb the nutrients it needed for them. So far I have managed to drop over a hundred pounds. As of today I am at 218 pounds and my BMI is 39.5. I need to get my BMI under 35-30 to safely give my son a kidney. Currently he is in ESRD with his creatinine at 5.65. We dont need dialysis at this time because his other levels are still baseline. We are hoping to get me tested and crossmatched with in the next 6 months. If everything comes out negative then we will be good to go. I still have about 30-35 pounds left to drop before we can do his transplant. In the mean time we have placed him on UNOS. If a kidney becomes available before I am finished testing and losing the weight we will take what they have and I will give my kidney to someone else that needs it.