Scott’s Healing Journey — Part 7: Hope Became Steady

When the Numbers Kept Moving

Scott’s Healing Journey — Part 7: When Hope Became Steady captures the moment when the numbers kept moving — and fear stopped dominating every decision.

By this point in Scott’s healing journey, we weren’t celebrating and we weren’t relaxed — but we were no longer bracing for impact every time new bloodwork came in.

We were still cautious.
Still quiet.
Still deeply aware of how fragile everything had felt just weeks earlier.

But something had shifted.

Nothing shifted overnight.
Nothing felt certain yet.
But something had changed.

But we were no longer bracing for impact.

And when you’ve lived in survival mode long enough, even a small shift matters.

The Pattern We Were Watching For

The first improvement had given us permission to breathe.

The second gave us something different.

Consistency.

By this point, we had already learned how closely we needed to listen to Scott’s body — because we had seen what happened when something didn’t align.

Under the care of the second transplant doctor, Scott was briefly placed on CellCept. It was a reasonable attempt, and we approached it with openness and trust.

But the labs told a different story.

His numbers worsened.

Not dramatically — but clearly enough that the trend mattered.

And by then, we knew something essential:

Scott’s body was communicating.

It told us when something helped.
And it told us when something didn’t.

So we made a deliberate decision.

We discontinued CellCept and returned to what had already been working:

• careful monitoring
• continued diuretics
• targeted supplements
• and the food and lifestyle changes we had already put in place

Just as important as what we were doing was how closely we were watching.

Why Frequent Bloodwork Became Non-Negotiable

Regular — for a time every month or two — bloodwork (monitoring the changes) became essential.

Insurance would only cover so many tests, but our doctor helped bridge that gap by ordering standing lab orders, which allowed Scott to test as often as he wanted paying out of pocket.

When additional labs weren’t covered by insurance, we chose to go further. We paid out of pocket — about $125 per test through Quest, always getting the estimate cost prior to the testing, with our doctor’s order on file — because having timely data mattered more than anything.

Those labs became our blueprint — our Holy Grail for understanding what Scott’s body was actually responding to.

They showed us what was working.
They alerted us when something wasn’t.
They helped us make calm, informed decisions instead of reactive ones.

Frequent bloodwork didn’t replace medical guidance — it worked alongside it. And for us was one of the most impactful and important choices we made. Without frequent bloodwork, we wouldn’t have seen patterns emerge — or caught subtle changes early enough to respond thoughtfully.

And in a situation where timing mattered, that access to real-time feedback became one of the most important and impactful choices we made to pay out of pocket for those test.

Monitoring didn’t replace intuition or clinical guidance.
It supported both.

And it gave us something invaluable during an uncertain time: Clarity.

When the Numbers Held

What happened next confirmed that decision.

The numbers didn’t snap back.
They didn’t spike in the wrong direction.
They didn’t erase the work Scott’s body had been quietly doing.

They held.

And then — in small ways — they kept moving forward.

That mattered more than any single lab value.

Because improvement once can feel like luck.
Improvement twice begins to feel like response.

And response tells you something fundamental:

The body is listening.

It responds to fear.
It reacts to urgency.
It tightens under pressure.

We saw that clearly — in labs, in symptoms, in exhaustion.

But we also learned something just as important:

The body doesn’t heal well in those states.

Healing asked for something different.

Consistency.
Nourishment.
Rest.
Alignment.

And we came to understand something else, just as clearly:

Gratitude and joy change the body, too.

They soften stress responses.
They create a sense of safety.
They shift the nervous system out of constant defense.

And safety is not emotional fluff — it’s biological permission to heal.

That moment reinforced something we would carry forward through the rest of Scott’s Healing Journey:

Healing isn’t about doing everything.
It’s about doing what the body can actually receive — physically, emotionally, and energetically.

When the nervous system feels safer, the body listens differently.
And when the body is listened to, it responds.

That became one of the quiet truths guiding every conscious decision we made from that point forward.

Scott’s Body Was Doing the Work

By the time we reached the second transplant doctor — nearly seven months into this journey — Scott was no longer in that initial state of collapse.

The first three to four months had been marked by deep exhaustion and long hours of sleep, as his body recalibrated and recovered from severe stress. But that phase had already passed.

Now, he was awake.
Present.
Engaged.

He was regaining strength.
Eating consistently.
Beginning to move through the day with more clarity and energy.

And most importantly — his body was no longer spiraling.

Underneath the visible improvements, something deeper was still unfolding.

Not a sudden turnaround.
Not a dramatic rebound.

But steady, foundational repair.

The kind that happens — when inflammation dissolves, systems stabilize, and the body begins to trust its environment again.

That mattered.

Because it told us the improvements we were seeing in his labs were not disconnected from how he felt.

They were aligned.

His body wasn’t just surviving.

It was responding.

Gratitude, Revisited — But Different Now

Gratitude had already become our anchor.

But now it felt less like survival
and more like acknowledgment.

Gratitude had already become our anchor.

But now it felt less like survival
and more like acknowledgment.

Gratitude for:

• a stable lab
• a quieter night
• one more week without decline
• the doctors who believed improvement was possible
• the food that stayed down
• the sleep that came easily

And the love we shared — because this is, after all, a love story.

The quiet kind.
Built in waiting rooms and kitchens.
In shared meals.
In long nights that didn’t need words.
Strengthened by nearly eighteen years of choosing each other long before this chapter ever arrived.

Gratitude didn’t mean we weren’t afraid.

It meant fear no longer led.

What We Knew — Even Then

We still didn’t know the ending.

But we knew this much:

Scott’s body was responding before anyone said it could.
The trajectory had changed.
And whatever came next, we were no longer standing at the edge of freefall.

We were walking — slowly — on solid ground.

Next: Part 8: Excellent Liver Function Confirmed →

We’ll also link out to Scott’s full bloodwork timeline in the next post, so you can see the data unfold exactly as we lived it — one lab at a time.

✨If you’re new here, you might also enjoy 💖 Our Story, The Joy List 🌟— Our Ultimate All Day Playlist — the Recipes we lean on when food becomes part of healing — and 🐶 Fur Baby Tales, where we share life through Jack’s eyes.