I'm still alive, I swear! A lot has happened in my little corner of Sick Girl Land as you'll soon see. Over the next week or so, I'll be catching you up. We have now made it up up to April 10, week two of the Coughlympics.
On Monday, I threw myself into work, hoping for a distraction from how badly I felt. It worked to a point. Around lunch, I called the office where I usually see Dr.Lungs to make an appointment. The office told me he wasn't going to be there for two weeks. The practice he's with has two offices and he was at the other one while on call at the hospital. I made an appointment to see him there the next afternoon., arranged for paratranist and let my boss know what was going on. Not that she needed much warning, my cough gave me away. The next morning, paratransit got me to the new office with plenty of time to spare. I drank my breakfast and finished up a book on my Kindle and then headed up to the appointment.
After checking in, a nurse brought me back to a do a mini Pulmonary Function Test called spirometry. This is the first thing I do at every visit to Dr. Lungs. The nurse puts an oh so attractive nose clip across my nose, and I have to breathe into a device hooked up to a computer. The test measures the amount of air you can inhale and exhale. Asthma is actually a disease that impacts how you exhale,. not inhale, even though it feels like the opposite. The test was particularly hard for me that day. Since last September when I began seeing a pulmonologist, we've known that I can't exhale for the required six seconds of the test. We've chalked that up to my positioning. On this day, I couldn't even do it for the second and a half that is my normal. We did the test three times. In the end the nurse handed me the nose clip and the mouthpiece to hang on to in case the doctor wanted to run the test again. I went back to the exam room and eventually Dr. Lungs came in. We talked for a few minutes, made longer by breaks for coughing. He advised that I start the Azithromocin and give steroids a try. He said that if the steroids didn't help, we might be looking on an admit to the hospital to get straightened out. He gave me the first steroid pill in the office, told me not to go to work that day and to e-mail him the next day with an update. I left the office, waited for paratransit, went to work for about an hour and then went home.
At this point, I started feeling a much more intense type of nausea than what I now think of as my "normal" GP-related nausea. I took a rescue of Zofran, which worked, and made a note to let Dr. Lungs know when I e-mailed him the next day.I tried to be as still and quiet as possible the rest of that day. I took my nightly meds and tried to sleep.
The next morning, Wednesday, I learned something critical about myself. I learned that taking a sick day requires just as much commitment from me as does a normal work day. I learned this after working five hours of what was supposed to be a sick day. I e-mailed Dr. Lungs and gave him an update at some point too. His response solidified my love for this doctor. He signed it with his first name. This guy is super cool! He asked me to bump up the steroid, add a regular liquid cough medicine, and e-mail him the next day. All good, I was still free! I let my boss know I would definitely be out the next day, settled in for the night.
The next morning I woke and immediately knew something was very wrong. I have been very hoarse for a very long time,but on this day, I had exactly no voice. Interesting. As the morning wore on I realized that Hadn't eaten or drank anything since the night before. Weird. Even more weird, I was totally fine with that situation. I also noticed a huge increase in cough. Awesome. I e-mailed Dr. Lungs around lunch. The e-mails first line was "I have no idea what's going on anymore." I then caught him up on what had happened. When I was finished composing this whiny laundry list of symptoms, I cautiously hit send, hoping that I could stay free. Because I'm a realist, I also packed an overnight bag.
Not 20 minutes later, I got a response. He asked which hospital of the two where he has privileges did I want to go to? The choice boiled down to the fact that I could be what's called a "direct admit" at one hospital because Dr. Lungs was on call there. Or, I could be admitted through the ER at the other hospital and have some stranger doctor take care of me. Not much of a choice really. After some back and forth about meds and things, I was ready to spend one more bad night at home, with the prospect of a couple of bad hospital nights creating many good nights at home. I was actually looking forward to the next morning. It would be Friday April 13....
Next Up: Hospital Days 1 and 2: APU,CTs and DVTs,
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