Sometimes Ya Just Gotta Laugh in The Everyday (A Diary Of Sorts)

It's Thursday, and this has been a week of ups and downs.

ON the up side; dialysis treatments seem to be going a bit better lately, and whereas I've been coming home feeling quite sick after them for the last couple of weeks, this week has been much better, with me not feeling sick either Monday or Wednesday. I have a treatment tomorrow (I have them three days a week, three and a half hours each treatment.) so we'll see how that goes.

Then there's the SodaStream machine that I purchased online last week and expected either Tuesday or Wednesday. It came late in the day, but soon enough that I could unpack it and explore what it could do and how to use it just a bit before going to a church meeting that evening. My first concoction; a soft drink made with Ocean Spray Cranberry-raspberry juice. Granted, the instructions say to use only water in the machine and add flavoring syrups or whatever afterward, but I used juice anyway. I figured what harm could it be, after all, and in fact, it worked just fine. The soft drink was fizzy and delicious. Yesterday I made my own flavored seltzer, flavored with fresh oranges that I cut up and let sit in the water for at least 24 hours. That's kind of what I bought the machine for; not to make soft drinks from the syrups they sell, but from my own ingredients, so I can control sugar content and other things. Next I want to try infusing water with some raspberries and limes, and putting that through the SodaStream. Yeah, I think I'm going to be using this thing a lot.

And the drinks will be good for me...

On the down side; I had a doctor's appointment yesterday. For the most part it went well; the good doctor (and he IS a very good doctor, indeed. I like and trust him completely.) took out a stubborn suture from a procedure I'd had done months ago. I'd tried on my own to get it to come out (the surgeon's assistant told me I could do that if I had any of those sutures left.) but was unsuccessful, so I let the doctor look at it. He took all of thirty seconds, armed with his little tweezers to get the thing out, and the wound is now beginning to heal and feels much better. Oh, but things went downhill from there.

I mentioned to him that for the past few weeks I've been noticeably short of breath from time to time, especially when moving around, like walking, for example. We discussed the situation a bit, looking at other possible symptoms that might go with the shortness of breath, and then he checked the oxygen level in my blood. It was 98%, which is very good.

After that, he had his nurse take me for a little walk while attached to the device to see what my oxygen level would do--and it droped--considerably, to 89%! Not good at all...

He then proceeded to give me several possible causes for this, ranging from asthma issues, to allergies, to a heart problem, and after looking at my records from the past couple of years, he noticed that my cardiologist had made a note about a problem with my aorta. That's one of the blood vessels that carries blood from the heart. It's the main one, in fact. Apparently I have developed aortic valve stenosis. This, from Wikipedia...

"Aortic valve stenosis (AS) is a disease of the heart valves in which the opening of the aortic valve is narrowed.[1] The aortic valve is the valve between the left ventricle of the heart and the aorta, which is the largest artery in the body and carries the entire output of blood."

Symptoms? According to Wikipedia, they include shortness of breath (I have that.), chest pain (I don't have that.), and sudden death. (Don't have that one either!) I never thought of sudden death as a symptom; it's kind of a final outcome if you asked me. In any event, it may be the problem I'm having, and I'm not happy about it. Who would be?

Treatments? There are several, from a couple of different catheter-based minimally invasive surgeries all the way up to open heart surgery. I've already said I won't consent to open heart surgery; I've had that done before, in the form of a triple bypass, and I won't be put through that sort of hell again, no way.

But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it, right?

Of course, it may not be the main problem anyway, and we might be able to treat it rather simply and get at what's really going on, and I have a feeling I'm going to be going through a lot of tests in the near future. I've already been scheduled for a chest x-ray and then we'll go from there. I see the doctor in two weeks. I'll know more then, I hope.

If it's not one thing, it's another, but we survive, don't we? What choice is there. In the meantime, ya do what ya gotta do. Me? I just find things to laugh at. I mean really, sometimes ya just gotta laugh. That's all there is to it..