Progress

Hello. I'm dictating this blog post using Dragon naturally. I wonder how it will go. If you see any strange typos it's probably the software.

The kiddo seems to be improving.  The pediatrician taught me how to listen to her lungs without a stethoscope and I can tell if she's getting worse or not. At first, the nebulizer treatments opened her up and made her wheezing worse, which is an indication of how tight she was. Then they started to clear her up.

My husband feels better too. So all the people with inhalers are doing okay. Even I had a good asthma run. The temperature went up by 30°, which is a big swing, and my lungs didn't care. I've really enjoyed going for walks the last few days.

My dog, my labby love, is not doing so well. She is 12 and that is pretty much the end of the line for most labs. She was spry and sassy up until the last week or so and suddenly she began soiling her bed. Both fecal and urinary incontinence. She became quite depressed and distressed about it.

On top of that, there was some change in cognition. She was forgetting the rules reverting to some puppy like chewing and naughtiness. Just not herself.

So we took her to the vet and we're going to try some medication for the incontinence. This will hopefully buy her some time as well as improve her quality of life.

We are in the process of doing some end-of-life planning for her. We are hoping to leave the state to spend some time with my husband's family this coming Spring and my gut --the same gut intuition that became so hyper about the flu--is concerned that she will have problems while we are away. I just have a bad feeling mostly because of the mental decline. I need to set up a care taker who can handle an elderly dog as well as have a plan in place with her vet should it become necessary.

She's a great dog and we will miss her. And I really hope my intuition is wrong.

Everyone's Got an Inhaler

In the middle of the never-ending doctor's appointment yesterday, I took the kiddo out to eat something.

I took her to Wendy's explaining it was easier for mommy to avoid gluten there than at McDonald's. As she watched me remove the bun from the hamburger she said, "Mommy, do I have a rash on my neck too?"

It felt like we were revisiting the theme of ' being just like mommy' which arose when she was told to take an inhaler a few weeks ago.

I looked at her and said, "You will always be my little girl, but you are not mommy. You will have your own life. It will be different from mine."

And then I took her to get a chest x-ray.

Later, the ped called with the verdict of asthma, not walking pneumonia.

Right now we are doing nebulizer treatments at regular intervals. The next step is steroids.

It's all just like mommy.

The universe is a sick, twisted bitch.

My hope is to see if we can skip systemic steroids and go for an inhaler like Qvar. Given my experiences, I think systemic steroids should be avoided at all costs. If there's a first time, there's a hundredth time with steroids. Not to mention she's way too much 'like mommy' for me to think oral steroids are no big deal. Keeping her off the oral form is her only shot at not repeating my history.

My husband isn't breathing well either. The flu has left him with a nagging cough and some asthma-like wheezing. He talks about going to the doctor, but it never happens. Instead he runs off to play hockey...except he can't breathe well enough to do anything but pant on the sidelines. He's now got one of my inhalers in his pocket.


And my twelve-year-old labby love is sick and going to the vet today. Hopefully she's okay and just needs antibiotics. At the rate things are going now, she'll get an inhaler too.

Not As Planned

For the last three months my kiddo has been sick. We've gone to the ped every month with varying degrees of success. The antibiotics seemed to work, but then she was sick again. We were instructed to treat it as asthma, which wasn't effective.

Today we went in for what was supposed to be a check up for the fluid behind her ears only to find out her lungs were bad enough to need a breathing treatment. And chest x-rays.

I don't know if there's a diagnosis beyond 'bad lungs' yet. The ped will call us later with any diagnosis and the plan going forward.

This was not how I saw my day going at all when I left the house early this morning.

Five long hours later, we are home.

I'm wiped. Don't know if it's because I'm not on progesterone this week or if it's just normal 'my baby is sick' stress.

It doesn't matter because the day isn't going to stop. The to-dos march on.

Public Navel Gazing

I'm on Nexium right now which is helping the heart burn. The odd thing is, a few weeks ago, Nexium did nothing and it was digestive enzymes that were helping. Such a flip-flop waffle body I have.

The way I'm going to do it now is simply to minimize tomatoes and peppers in my diet and use Nexium before eating them as well as continue to avoid wheat.

I've mentioned before that I'm a recovering preacher's kid and we recently joined a church in our neighborhood. It has not been all that positive of an experience.

Something you may or may not know about churches is that the janitors, organists, choir directors and pretty much anyone on the Trustee Committee are all huge pains in the ass. They have agendas. They dislike people and manuveur within the congregation solely based on who they are out to get. They gang up on the pastor.

It's like work, but without the mediation that HR can provide. Plus your entire family is a target.

This bullshit is one of the reasons why I avoided the church as an adult. I'd had enough of it growing up. Everybody is 'happy, happy, Jesus, Jesus' to your face and then twisting the knife in your back.

But I had a kid who wanted to know about Jesus. So off to church we went and now I'm not sure it was such a good decision.

Last Sunday we got caught in a pissing match between the pastor and the janitor because my husband got suckered into being a Trustee. We had ringside seats. I felt bad for the pastor who had no idea how to manage their employee. Corporate America may be the root of all evil, but they are very good about creating SOPs to follow and do provide useful management training upon occasion. Churches don't offer much in that area beyond prayer and leaving it to Jesus.

To top it off, I am running the Women's Bible Study. This has to be a bad sign when the new kid is left with such a large responsibility. I don't mind organizing or facilitating, but I am not dogmatic, nor am I a fundamentalist. The curriculum is exactly that...a series of DVDs with a privileged white woman who urges us to pray face down on the floor as we invoke God as our rescuer because our first world problems are that important. It's Checklist Christianity...if I do xyz then I am a good Christian. And it's bullshit. I will do my best to not say anything along those lines, but it's going to be tough because I feel very strongly about it.

So now I'm stuck. The hubby is stuck. The seamy underbelly of faith is showing. This is probably not the right church for us and there may not be one that would be a good fit.

Fire in the Hole

I have no idea when I will be able to sleep tonight. I have such horrific heart burn and I don't know why.

This suspected wheat allergy/intolerance thing is hard on my gut. I not only get the rash on my neck, but the GERD spins out of control too.

And it takes days, if not weeks to calm down.

I am not sure what I ate to piss it off now. All I can think of is...I have been showing heightened sensitivity to peppers and tomatoes again and I had some peppers yesterday. I also forgot myself and licked some powdered sugar off my fingers...powdered sugar that had been on a flour pastry.

It doesn't seem like that should have tipped me over the edge into the volcano, but something sure did.

And yes, the rash is back..this time mostly under my collar bone with two little devil horns extending up the sides of my neck.

I wouldn't mind so much if the GERD wasn't so dang painful.
 

Ork

I worked out last night...took me all day to wake up and feel up to it. Which was a bummer.

I'm on a new progesterone dose and that may be part of the issue. I don't know.

The work out went pretty well. I pushed myself through it and don't feel too bad this morning.

But I think I'm going to drink a Coke Zero today.

I need a kick in the pants, badly and my body has lost its ability to provide one organically.

Why, yes, I am talking about organic kicks in the pants.

I can really go down some strange rabbit holes sometimes.

Anyway, I did some preliminary research on progesterone as a treatment for PCOS in the hopes  of someday writing an informed opinion as a patient who has tried it.

It's a finicky thing this bio-identical hormone replacement. You really have to stick with it and monitor things closely, which is expensive and time consuming. I'm 7 months in and we're still sorting out the dose.

You would never guess that from the rah-rah cheerleading from Suzanne Somers and her ilk, which irks me. There's a dishonesty in her books and marketing that fails to give proper guidance to patients. Bio-identical hormones are not a miracle cure, they take work and careful attention to detail.

I hope to expand on this in the near future so there's a resource for other patients that is based on actual reality and not the pipe dream being hawked by profiteers.

As for the writing, since I'm using a patient blog as my writer's diary these days, another book hit the Top 100. That marks four now.

And umm, I have some fans now.

That freaks me out.

I now know the 'voice' and writing style that resonates with readers. So naturally my next two projects are completely different.

I didn't plan it this way. I had no idea things were going to take off so I just kept writing and now the pipeline is filled with things my fans probably won't like. Whoops.

Well maybe I'll reach some new fans.

Now just to write faster.

*Title courtesy of Mr. Popper's Penguins which I'm currently reading to the kiddo. Ork pretty much sums it all up, don't you think?

Lucky 13

At the beginning of every month I write out my to-do list for the writing. I did that this morning and hovered between wanting to dive in and get cranking or going back to bed.

I'm having a sleepy couple of days. Can't seem to rev my engines (also filed under: God how I miss Coke Zero).  I did a harder workout on Sunday, the first since the flu and it tanked me. I ran into someone at the grocery store the day after. They greeted me with a smile and a 'Are you feeling okay? You look wiped.'

(Interestingly enough this was the same person who pulled up alongside my car when I had bronchitis in May just to tell me I looked awful. I wonder what that's about.)

It was reminiscent of the bad old adrenal days.

Although it is not new that hard workouts are too much for me. That has been relatively consistent. The main improvement is that I no longer have adrenal related GI stuff after intense exercise.

My hope is that this is just an adjustment period. Or maybe this is the pattern where I get through an illness okay only to emerge with a lagging stress response.

I'll stick with it for a month or so and see if my energy improves as my strength grows.

May 2013 be kind to everyone it meets.