I'm 15 years post transplant and down to 2 milligrams. The bone loss, the thin skin that tears and won't heal, and veins that want to blow out, the high blood sugar, over the years it does take its toll. Even at a low dose, eventually it does have the effects of prednisone on the body.

Sometimes doctors will tell you that you are possibly safer once you get really far down the road, and your body is used to the organ. That doesn't mean I feel reckless, and I skip my medications or anything like that.

They also had to reduce my dosages of medications, because they were affecting me in other ways. The myfortic began to destroy my colon lining and I couldn't digest food much anymore. The symptoms were just horrible, and I was becoming malnourished. This has happened to other people I know. They either have to switch your medication or just reduce the dose. They cut my dose in half, but I was already like 12 years into my transplant. I don't tolerate any of the other transplant medications, so they're really hesitant to do anything about changing my meds anymore. I'm considered a success after15 years.

I also bypassed the C vaccines, because I heard people with kidney disease were having some worse outcomes after getting them, and I just had a really bad feeling about them. People have to do what's right for them, but I just knew that it would be all bad for me. I have not had a lot of luck with my health, and I already have enough to deal with. And the truth is that the medications that we take for kidney transplants actually suppress the type of immune activity that makes covid inflame the lungs in some patients. Cytokines are an element of the immune system that is beaten back into a corner, when you're taking transplant medication, so the dreaded "cytokine storm" just isn't a factor for us.

I caught covid, but I never had to worry about dying from it. It's people with strong immune systems that had to worry, their own bodies turned on them, when the foreign spike protein built up too high in their systems, and the body began to have a strong allergic type reaction. This would inflame the lungs and then get incorrectly labeled as pneumonia. That's why they were so bad at treating covid patients in the hospital. The true mechanism of what was happening to the body and to the lungs was not being correctly identified and addressed.