Entry 04
Collin achieves his summer body.
TLDR, Collin lost 51 pounds in less than 30 days by peeing.
One of the most recognizable symptoms of worsening congestive heart failure is extreme fluid retention. When the heart is not pumping blood out to the rest of your body, that blood gets stuck and starts leaking into places that it shouldn’t. Typically it appears as swelling in the ankles, calves, or gut…but often this fluid surrounds the heart and backs into the lungs, making it extremely difficult to breathe.
At admission on June 16, Collin weighed 307 pounds, which is his peak “wet weight.” His normal “dry weight” was around 286 pounds, so compounded with the shortness of breath, we knew Collin was in crisis mode.
To get him back into maintenance mode, the first priority for the transplant team was to get good blood outflow and reduce the leakage via the Impella device. The second priority was to offload these excess fluids.
So how do they work this magic?
The transplant team placed Collin on a strict fluid intake restriction of 2,200 ml (approx 1/2 gallon) per day. Whether water, lemonade, ice, sherbert…once he hits his limit, he’s cut off.
They also optimized Collin’s daily cocktail of IV drips to include a drug called Bumex, a pretty powerful diuretic. Frankly, it makes you pee. A LOT. On average, Collin dumps 6,000 to 7,000 liters (nearly 2 gallons) over a 24 hour period which, if you’re following the math, is 4 nearly times what he’s intaking!
Ozempic could literally never (not an exaggeration, he tried that too), and it’s evident to us now that the excess weight he couldn’t shed was all liquid.