Getting Worse... But With Better Help

After spending three and a half years on a waiting list for a doctor and all my spare time or so it seemed in the emergency room. One evening a triage nurse who had seen way to much of me handed me a number stating, "I don't know if it will help but it certainly can't hurt."   The nest day I called the number and after explaining my situation got totally reamed out and told that there was nothing she could do for me.  However, one week later we received a call for doctor appointments for both my husband and myself, finally. Whoot! 

After leaving my first doctor appointment I already had a pneumonia shot and appointments for a pulmonary function tests and arterial blood gases test. For the first time I actually felt that I was finally on the right track.

My first Spirometry  which is the most common of the Pulmonary Tests and it measures the volume and the speed that the air flow can be inhaled and exhaled. It places you sitting down in a glass cubicle with a nose clip on and breathing through a two inch plastic cylinder.  First exercise has you breathing in and out blowing out as hard and as fast and you can.,next exercise is breathing out for as long as you can and finally the third exercise has you breathing in and out in short spurts however, at some point the oxygen will be blocked off, but you must keep breathing in and out for a set amount of time. These tests are done three times each without the use of puffers. Finally they are all repeated another three time each after you take your puffers. This shows how good the puffers are helping you or not helping you 

The arterial gas test measures the amount of oxygen found in your blood.  They perform this test by drawing blood from your main artery in your wrist, the artery unlike the vein has a tendency to roll and move about. Now, I never minded getting normal blood tests but damm this hurts this one really hurts. Even hours later, and you are getting out of a chair and you put weight on your wrist Owww! it certainly jolts you back to remembering. hahaha

My doctor's biggest beef about these tests results is that we have absolutely nothing to compare them to. There is however, one thing I do know that even after quitting smoking all these years, each and every year I have gotten worse.  My disease is definitely progressing, but as yet we have no proof.

My doctor also sent my name into a specialist in Charlottetown, however, this year turned out to be a very busy year for me and somehow I completely forgot about the specialist not calling. My life just kept getting busier and busier with my husband's health issues and my brother dying from cancer in Ontario.  Every week, my job increasing became harder and harder to do. There were many, many days where I just couldn't,  no matter how hard I tried to muster any energy.  Constantly pushing myself all year to do the easiest of jobs and more often catching myself taking shortcuts on the harder jobs and the guilt I felt over this just added to my problems. Soon it was the end of the year and still no call and at this point I assumed that I missed it!