Last night I took 1 mg of Xanax XR about an hour before bed, and I got the best night's sleep I've had in ages. I didn't wake up even once with anxiety dreams. It could be coincidence, or it could be a potential answer to the recent rash of anxiety dreams. I'm going to take .5 mg tonight and see what happens. If I still have anxiety dreams, I'll try 1 mg again tomorrow night. I'll do a bit of experimenting. Perhaps I could take .5 mg of XR each night, and then only take the regular Xanax during the day when needed? But the pharmacists were really freaked out at the prospect of combining the XR and the regular Xanax. Well, after seeing the meds doc I plan to take my prescriptions to a different pharmacy, so I'll talk to the pharmacist there. In fact, I plan to go to Walgreens tomorrow for other reasons, so perhaps I'll talk to the pharmacist while I'm there. I like that idea.

I'm seeing the meds doc on Thursday -- and so we can discuss my experiments with the XR and anxiety meds should be a bit more sorted out -- and I'm seeing the nephrologist on Friday -- and so I'll know more about the current State of the Kidneys.

I went and got my blood drawn today for the nephrologist and was surprised that she hadn't ordered any urinalysis. But, then, I suppose she'll be mostly looking at my creatinine, eGFR, blood sugar, and sodium levels, and all of those are tested via the blood, not the urine. It just seemed strange to check up on my kidneys and not look at my urine. Counterintuitive.

I'm very anxious to see the nephrologist. Not anxious in a worried sort of way, but "anxious" in an "I can't wait and wish it could happen right now" kind of way. I wish I could test my blood any time I wanted to, like a diabetic can, and know the state of my kidneys at any particular moment. I wish I could always know. It's just this big cloud hanging over me all the time, even though I know the condition is unlikely to get worse.

I'm expecting lab results similar to the levels we saw in August: creatinine around 1.30 and eGFR around 50. Creatinine lower and eGFR higher would be better, of course, but the nephrologist seemed to think, back in August, that my levels were unlikely to change much moving forward. Still, I suppose there's a chance. I'm not getting my hopes up ... I'm expecting things to be stable. That would be good enough for me.

Questions for the nephrologist:
- creatinine, eGFR, blood sugar, sodium, and electrolyte levels (of course)
- Do I need to keep drinking Gatorade every day? It's become annoying and costly.
- Is this amount of nausea normal at my level of kidney function, or should I be looking for some other, unrelated cause?