Meeting Jeff’s Surgeon

At the end of July, Jeff was sent to meet Dr Gaetano Ciancio, the chief medical and academic officer of the Miami Transplant Institute, and the director of it’s Kidney Program. We would find out today that he would be the surgeon to perform Jeff’s portion of the transplant!

We both loved Ciancio from the minute we met him. Very lighthearted and kind, putting us both at ease as he answered all the questions we had. He assured us we were following the safest path, and that they would take care of whatever needs we might have.

He explained that Jeff would likely be on higher steroids (Prednisone) and medications (anti-rejection) than the previous transplant, but it was safe and as expected.

As little as we’d heard, all the pieces made us feel like we were getting very close. It seemed that we got all our positivity from things being said like “you’re looking good”, “so far no issues” and things like that. They really didn’t like to make any promising statements outright, which I understood. On the off-chance that something did change, they didn’t want us sitting there with our hopes as high as they could be.

So we said thank you to the surgeon, went home, and August turned out to be the quietest time we’d had since starting this whole process.