hospital, day two

I feel a little better today, but not much.  I got about 8 hours of sleep last night, interrupted a couple of times by nurses doing blood draws and giving me heparin shots (to make sure I don't develop a clot from just sitting in bed for so long).

They took me off the oxygen in my room since I seem to be staying steadily above 95% when I don't do anything.  It's kind of fun to watch the monitor.  It panics when I blow my nose.  The incredible exertion of moving the hospital crap and my phone and laptop from one table to another while still sitting in bed (to make room for my breakfast tray) dropped me down to 89%. 

We did a walking test this afternoon and the results were basically the same as  yesterday - I dropped to 84% (instead of 82%).  That's not much improvement.  One thing did change this afternoon though - my cough was actually productive for the first time.  I've spent most of my time with the bed raised so I'm sitting up and reading the interwebs or my kindle.  I laid it flat this afternoon for a nap and that's when it changed - it got deeper and I started coughing up bubbles. Not mucous.  Just foam and a little bit of tasteless liquid.  The doctors were thrilled (it's a teaching hospital, there are five of them on my case).  I've had a specimen cup waiting for sputum since they checked me in yesterday.  I haven't heard back if they learned anything from it yet. 

So they're still basically treating it like walking pneumonia (the antibiotics) with a side of taxol inflammation (prednisone).  They're also testing for virus, it could be influenza presenting weirdly because of all the drugs I've been taking, and if that's the case they'll start me on tamiflu as well.  
 
I'm planning to lay the bed back flat about an hour before I want to go to sleep and see if that doesn't help move some more of the crap out of there, if it is truly breaking up. 

Across the board they are expecting to see a major improvement tomorrow morning because that will be the third dose of everything, and apparently that's the threshold for most people.  If that happens they will be sending me home with an oxygen tank and monitor tomorrow night.  If not, I'll be here at least another day. 

I didn't get to see Bob today.  He had a long day at school and then an important meeting he didn't want to miss around his football officials association.  He offered to skip it, but I told him to go.  I'm still mostly just in standby mode.  In a random coincidence my sister is in town for a few days with her boyfriend.  He's attending a conference, and she came along for the ride hoping to hang out with me for a bit, so she'll try to come down tomorrow via caltrain or catch a ride with Bob when he comes after class in the morning.  I'm looking forward to that.  Today was good to just be down and by myself.  I'm sure I'll be a bit stir crazy tomorrow now that I've got some active brain cells again.