I left the house this morning for the first time since I got home from the hospital last Saturday, to drive back to the hospital for a check in with the pulmonary team. They are really happy with my progress. I don't need to use the I.S. to expand my lungs any farther. I took the emergency O2 with me and carried it around, but I felt well enough to walk from the parking structure to the hospital. There's a bunch of construction, so it's maybe a 6-8 minute walk, which is sadly the most exercise I've had in at least three weeks now. That went fine, I was a smidge out of breath and tired by the time I got into the clinic, but I think that's just complete lack of activity catching up with me. We did another O2 test in the hospital where I walked with the monitor on my hand and was breathing well enough to sustain conversation with the doc for about five minutes and never dropped below 92%. My heart rate is still totally bonkers. It was 106 when I was sitting there in the office chatting. It dropped into the 90s while I was walking, and then spiked back up to 120 after I sat back down.
I finished the Tamiflu yesterday and the original antibiotics this morning. I still do have a little bit of that dry cough though, which has now been here since the last week of September and was really the first sign of something going wrong. And that means it's not all right. It's definitely better, but clearly there's still something happening there.
So I'm stepping down the prednisone from 40mg a day to 30mg a day, and monitoring myself for any changes tomorrow, and if I continue to be stable or improve, I'll drop down to 20mg a day next Friday. Of course, prednisone is a major double-edged sword. It's fixing the inflammation, but reduces my immune response further, so I get to start two weeks of Bactrim tomorrow, to protect me from a fungal infection in my lungs that I'm apparently now at high risk for. Yay.
They're scheduling me for a general pulmonary function test sometime next week and then a follow up with them on Nov 14.
The lung docs feel like I'm safe to do that biopsy, but want to follow the oncologist's lead on it. I meet with her on Monday afternoon and I think it's likely we'll get the biopsy in late next week if I don't react badly to the prednisone drop over the weekend.
I utterly failed at not working today, but only because I had a couple of hours worth of final wrap-up phone calls I wanted to do and couldn't get on the schedule yesterday. I'm really done now. I do have a couple of things to keep me busy as I feel up for it though, "wedding" planning and I've been trying and never finding the time to do a Project Management Professional certification (PMP) for a couple of years now. I've got all the books and never had time to study for the test, so I'll spend an hour or two a day on it as I feel up to it over the next few months. It's not work-work, but it's good to have something to focus on that I can completely set my own pace with.
I finished the Tamiflu yesterday and the original antibiotics this morning. I still do have a little bit of that dry cough though, which has now been here since the last week of September and was really the first sign of something going wrong. And that means it's not all right. It's definitely better, but clearly there's still something happening there.
So I'm stepping down the prednisone from 40mg a day to 30mg a day, and monitoring myself for any changes tomorrow, and if I continue to be stable or improve, I'll drop down to 20mg a day next Friday. Of course, prednisone is a major double-edged sword. It's fixing the inflammation, but reduces my immune response further, so I get to start two weeks of Bactrim tomorrow, to protect me from a fungal infection in my lungs that I'm apparently now at high risk for. Yay.
They're scheduling me for a general pulmonary function test sometime next week and then a follow up with them on Nov 14.
The lung docs feel like I'm safe to do that biopsy, but want to follow the oncologist's lead on it. I meet with her on Monday afternoon and I think it's likely we'll get the biopsy in late next week if I don't react badly to the prednisone drop over the weekend.
I utterly failed at not working today, but only because I had a couple of hours worth of final wrap-up phone calls I wanted to do and couldn't get on the schedule yesterday. I'm really done now. I do have a couple of things to keep me busy as I feel up for it though, "wedding" planning and I've been trying and never finding the time to do a Project Management Professional certification (PMP) for a couple of years now. I've got all the books and never had time to study for the test, so I'll spend an hour or two a day on it as I feel up to it over the next few months. It's not work-work, but it's good to have something to focus on that I can completely set my own pace with.
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