Had to go to the local ER at five o'clock yesterday morning for asthma treatment... my brain was so foggy from lack of oxygen that I couldn't think of the most basic things, and I felt like I was wading through treacle. John had to help me get dressed and bring me my walker to get out the door (at least I didn't have to try to deal with stairs! We would have had to call 911 if we were still living in that upstairs apartment and ambulances don't come cheap.) The ER didn't make a fuss but they were very nice and said that if I'm in ANY doubt I should go in because that's what they're there for (yes I know they're right but they're not the ones paying the medical bills - I'm not going to go to the ER unless home treatment has failed, but I'm not entirely stupid. I know a bad asthma attack can kill you, and I have no desire to end up on a ventilator because my lungs shut down entirely!) I think John said my oxygen saturation was in the 70s before the treatment kicked in, but I came good pretty quickly with oxygen and the nebuliser, so they sent me home four hours later. I slept the rest of the morning, and John got to go to work sleep deprived poor thing. I hate feeling like that! It reminds me entirely too much of the way grandma got sick over and over again with some weird pseudo-alzheimers thing that put her in the hospital for weeks at a time every year... Now I have a nebuliser and prednisone and a fresh inhaler of Advair, and the names of a couple of local doctors to try and get in to see. The nebuliser works great but it keeps me awake even longer than the regular inhaler does... I got up and used it at four this morning, and I'm just getting tired again at 6.30.
PS. We got DirecTV on the weekend and there's hundreds of channels - but there's still nothing watchable at 3am because 90% of them play overnight advertising. I might be wakeful but I'm not desperate enough to watch shop-o-vision.
And PPS. The way the cats react to the nebuliser is the funniest thing... I've got to get John to take a photo next time I use it. All four make a beeline for the livingroom doorway and stand there staring at me with wide eyes and the most consternated looks on their faces. They HATE loud noises, and here I am sitting there for 10 minutes with a noisy sucky monster right in my face. They've only heard it twice so far. I wonder if they'll get used to it? Speaking of the cats, Zho-Zho made her escape when John was trying to get me out the door yesterday... I was really worried about her but it's not like we could catch her in the dark while I was struggling to breathe. When we got home we called her and she came trotting up like she was saying 'FINALLY I got what I wanted! You know I'm an Outdoor Cat - if I could deal with six foot iguanas and d-creatures, I can handle anything, not stop over-protecting me and let me out at night to play!' So I guess I'll let her out... but first we really really need to get her a collar and a flea/tick treatment so she doesn't bring little friends back to the others... Tessie's going to be pissed about it - she wants to go out too but I don't trust her as far as I can throw her. She's entirely too curious and if she saw a gator she'd probably try to catch it!
And lastly, I'm not going to try to wean off the Advair again. I hate spending thirty bucks a month on an inhaler that doesn't seem to be doing a darned thing, but that's the whole point. IT WORKS. It works so well that I test out as non-asthmatic unless I'm in a full flare (at which point it's obvious to blind Freddy I'm in distress and need treatment.) So I don't want to bother to go the pulmonologist because they say 'you're fine, see you next year, that'll be a hundred bucks for the respiratory tests', and then I forget to take it and imagine that I don't need it any more because maybe this whole asthma thing was a big fuss about nothing, or maybe I've grown out of it and it's disappeared as mysteriously as it came on three years ago (yeah, sure, that's likely) If I take it twice a day the way I'm supposed to, I barely wheeze at all. Once a day is a little iffy - sometimes I'm okay, sometimes I get an asthma attack that lasts a day or so - but going off it is what sends me to the hospital after a month or so. It's obvious even to somebody as dense as me that I need it...
Okay, NOW I'm off to bed again.
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