Excessive Urinating After Transplant

[Joanna]

Hi All!

My partner had a living donor kidney transplant 3 weeks ago! Creatinine is now 99!
Eveything has gone and is going really well except he is producing an excessive amount of urine.
It has now peaked at 17.3 Litres!!!
He is still doing his best to keep up with the fluid balance and has only been falling slightly behind which the doctors are really impressed with!
Now on Salt tablets to try and concentrate urine.

Has this happened to anyone after transplant? The doctors are saying its a sleepy kidney and its not concentrating the fluid into urine. He is also having EPO injections as his kidney is not telling the body to produce red blood cells!

But I am slightly confused why it is doing some jobs but not others!

Any reassurance would be appreciated

Thansk Jo

Hope your all as well as possible today! x

[webster]

Hi. Jo, My husband had his transplant August 14th, he is having a bit of a rough time. Shingles, high creatinine, but his kidney is in overdrive, putting out more fluid than he is drinking, At the moment he is down to 6 ltrs out put. He is now finding it hard to keep up, his stomach feels like a medicine ball with all the fluid he is drinking, because he feels so 'full' he does not have an appetiate. so now he is losing weight. We feel we are going round in circles, like chasing a galloping horse.

We have been told if he carries on like this he will have to go on iv fluids.

Told on Monday his kidney is still not functioning properly yet.

'Beat the Kidney' is not a good game!!!

Hope yours slows down soon, take care


Carol

[MandyV]

Wow - 17.3l - I hope they are monitoring his blood levels as I managed to wash all the phosphate out of my body post tx because I only drank water!

I was told that because no nerves are transplanted the kidney cannot get messages about concentrating urine etc and it basically produces at its own pace and this continues for some time until new pathways are developed (hence post tx I was up at least 2x in the night as in normal situations you concentrate urine in your sleep but not until it 'knows' that it should be doing it). So certainly some degree of this is perfectly normal - as to the level, never heard of that but I was also told to allow a bit of the extra fluid that they loaded me with via drip to go each day but not too much (they gave me a figure - just can't remember it) so that the kidney would slow down a bit and adjust (which it now does very efficiently).

I also thought that the sodium tablet was to prevent lack of sodium due to extra fluid intake as I don't know how that actually concentrates the urine.

I am sure others will have more pertinant information as I know extra urine production is normal, that is much higher than my experience which was closer to 6l ...

[sanela]

I was given sodium tablets to stimulate the thirst although I never drank more than 5-6 litres in the first 3-4 months. In the first few weeks I got up almost on the hour through the night with a full bladder so I was also given Fludrocortisone which is supposed to help retain fluids and it certainly worked.


Sanela

[crowes]

Fludrocortisone makes you retain fluids? That's very good to know. I've never been on Fludrocortisone, but in the past I've worried that I've been losing too much liquid from the countless medications and short term health insurance I've been on. How long were you on the medication?

[sanela]

Only for a short time, 2-3 months, until the transplanted kidney starts to concentrate urine on it’s own. It’s a steroid (must be kept in fridge) so I was taken off gradually over a couple weeks gradually reducing the dose.

[Aileen]

Fludrocortisone? Gosh, one of my dogs has to take that daily for canine Addison's disease.

[webster]

My husbands out put is still 8 - 10 ltrs per day, having to drink that much as well. He is also on fludrocortisone, Had transplant in August, but still not settled down yet

[sanela]

Your husband seems to have a very thirsty kidney! How much fludrocortisone is he taking? I think my highest dose was 400ngr. Took about 4 months before I was off it and my kidney was settled. I still drink a minimum of 3.5 litres of fluid (mainly water but also tea, cordial, juice rarely, clear soup etc) per day which is sometimes hard in winter but in summer I have more to compensate for perspiration and warmer weather. Every kidney has it’s own pace.

Aileen, who knew! Steroids are used in such a varied way but I would never have thought they were interchangeable between human and animal. It might be formulated slightly differently to adapt to canine needs?

[Aileen]

The brand name of the tablets my dog takes is Florinef and are exactly the same tablets that a human friend who suffers from Addison's disease is prescribed. Usually when a dog is ill it's difficult to know exactly how the dog feels, but my friend describes exactly what his 'troughs' are like and also how it affects him if he forgets to take his meds. (Addison's is a hormonal disorder resulting from abnormal steroid production by the adrenal glands.)

[Johnylefox]

I passed at least 15 litres in the day or two after tx.
Today I am 7 weeks out and I have peed about 30 times today. I get the odd day when I need to go 2 or 3 times per hour. But never see any infection in my samples.