Immunosuppression

But, it is important to note, transplantation to academic staff does not solve all problems.

There is always a risk of rejection, and you have to take immunosuppressive medicine life-long.

In general, there are three kinds of drug to take:

To start with, there is the steroid of clinical duty. Everyone from the administration say that it is critically important to have some steroid. Nonetheless, one will certainly have rejection if he takes steroid of clinical duty alone. Many of my fellow patients are, therefore, very keen to try a steroid-free regimen - or to stop (or minimize the dose of) steroid themselves without anyone knows.

Next, you have the azathioprine of student teaching.

No, I don't mean it works. Just that it's kind of bread-and-butter stuff; everyone who has a graft kidney is advise to take some azathioprine, and every academic staff is expected to do some teaching. Many of my fellow colleagues use it for the steroid sparing effect - teaching medical students is always a good excuse for not doing clinical duty.

And, finally, the major drug that could prevent an academic staff from rejection is the cyclosporin of research.

But, cyclosporin is a difficult drug to handle; the absorption fluctuates a lot: A few fortunate (or actually clever) ones need only to take a small dose but would have a satisfactory blood level; many others may take a huge amount but the drug could hardly be detected in the blood. On some good days, without much effort, we could publish a paper in a journal with high impact fact. More commonly, however, our work is no more than tracing our own tail and all our efforts go in vain.