Another one breathes easy

"Breathe easy."

"Breathe easy."

"Breathe easy."

This is the most common comment left in Youtube, facebook, and online memorial guestbooks when someone with CF passes away. It is simple to understand why. After a lifetime spent trying to breathe with less difficulty, losing ground little by little, and ultimately losing the war, death frees us. Whether there is life after breath, who knows? But if there is, we hope our friends are, indeed, breathing easy.

Alyssa Marie Crank -- breathe easy.

Ten minutes

I'm stepping out to get some grub in ten minutes, but thought I'd post first.

Had a doctor's appointment today. I outlined some of the problems I'm having, such as the low blood sugars at night and, of course, increasing tightness and shortness of breath, etc. I'll have to talk with the endocrinologist soon.

We did PFTs of course, and they were the lowest I've ever had. FEV1 is 20% of predicted. :( I had no idea I'd slipped that far - I don't feel *that* short of breath. I ran 6.5 miles on Sunday. I'm a little winded at the top of stairs, but nothing like what I've experienced before. And yet the numbers don't lie.

So IVs will start again Friday. For the record, my last ones were in December, not September as I'd thought. So I managed a six-month stretch. Not too bad! But I'm not looking forward to the side effects of the IVs, such as the yeast infections. For that matter, I'm also going on a course of White Candy (prednisone) and not looking forward to the side effects of *that* either.

I've also dropped some cash on a new window AC for the kitchen. The old one was 11 years old and had just had it. I'm setting it out on the sidewalk with the trash tonight. The one in the bedroom is 8 years old and seems to be holding up OK. The new one in the kitchen has some automatic features for saving energy (I just heard the fan lower a bit, now that it's finally cooler in here) and has an ionizing mode. :) It is 12,000 BTU and heavy as hell, but I managed it. It has to cool 2/3 of the apartment, so I needed a big one.

Cough Syncope update

I find it interesting that my February 2009 post here is the sixth post in a google search for "cough syncope". Awesome.

I haven't had another episode since my birthday last year. While I did sell the motorcycle, I have promised myself that if I remain in good health and don't have a cough syncope episode by my birthday this year, I'll buy another bike and have a very specific March ride in mind.

Always good to have goals. :)

The negativity of the nomenclature of the nap.

I just got up from a two-hour nap. After getting only 4 hours of sleep last night so that I could be at the park by 6:30 to volunteer for the Healthy Kidney 10K (the winner of which, BTW, set a new course record), I felt like going home, but had to hang around and meet a colleague to meet for brunch and talk about a small job he wanted me to do.

So when I finally got home, I decided to take a nap.

But what is this "take a nap" phrase? Why must we take it? Why can't we give it? That's so much more positive, the idea of giving ourselves a gift of a nap; rather than the negative idea that we have to steal a nap from our day.

Similarly, why do we get our children "put down for a nap"? Why "put down"? That, too, is full of negative connotations. If you apply it to any other breathing animal, it means to have them killed! Is there an unconscious desire amongst all parents that their kid's next nap might be their last? Here, again, we could use a better phrase - GIVE. "I'm going to give Johnny a nap," despite the mob-enforcer overtones, is at least marginally better than "I'm going to put Johnny down."

So today, I GAVE myself a nap.

Or does this entire line of thinking simply signal my transition into old person?

No blogging

Sorry, just can't do it. Many thoughts recently which would be great to work out in these writings, but I just don't have the interest anymore. The time of my life when this seemed important is done now. Many things changed in the latter half of last year and it is such a sharp dividing line between what came before and what comes after.

This was one of the primary means of communicating with my dad. This is how he knew what was going on with me. Realizing that, and with him gone, I don't know who I'm writing for. Maybe it's time to just delete the damn thing.

Well, I'll wait. I'm sure I'll enter some big race and go through a training cycle sometime soon - I'll come back to this as a training diary, nothing more.