12/19/06 - The luck of warmth ends the same day as a doctors appointment.

I hope that everyone hasn't missed me too much, but by some stroke of luck the weather in NY has been useasonably warm. We've probably been somewhere in the neighborhood of 15-20 degrees above normal. This works out well because the cold bothers my lungs a lot. So for the past two weeks, I have enjoyed a bit of a respite. But somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew that this would not last. And today the weather and the calendar caught up with one another.

So while I tried to get accustomed to the cold again, which involves a lot of burning when I breathe, I headed off to the pulmonologist for my next follow up appointment. The drive up was, of course, interesting as the holidays approach - the roads in NY tend to resemble parking lots more and more. So it takes most of my patience not to freak out on these holiday drivers who have now decided to use this time on the parkways to tend to all sorts of personal grooming details. However, this story isn't simply to illustrate my semi-fanaticism while driving, nor to say that I cannot yell at these people (which after reading these last posts would be a no-brainer) - but that even the act of becoming upset causes ones breathing rate to increase. This is inherently bad when you become short of breath while driving (or crawling along as it happened to be), so it didn't take me very long to realize that I needed to calm down and just accept the fact that when I get there - I get there.

This incident is one of many that serve to illustrated a few things; first, you never appreciate little things you do until you can no longer do them. And second, you usually will not realize that you can no longer do these things till the most inconvenient moment possible. So we can add getting upset while driving to the list of things on the things I wont be doing for a while.

I arrive at the doctors office and walk the two blocks to the building, while still adjusting to the cold. Happy to be inside, I wait for the doctor to see me. He seemed to be happy that the regime he has me on is working to at least keep this loss of pulmonary function at bay. However, as I explained to him, while the nebulizer works so much better than the Albuterol Inhaler, it does keep me kind of tethered to the house. For which he explained that this is what I am going to have to get myself to accept. This is the first of the news that I was not going to like.

He sat across the table and stated that after looking over the test results that this wasn't a simple case of RADs but was looking more and more like COPD. For the non-medical people reading this, COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease) is an umbrella term used to describe lung disease associated with airflow obstruction. Most generally, emphysema, chronic bronchitis and chronic asthma either alone or in combinations fall into this category. However my symptoms take on the asthma/emphysema combo. While there have been great advancements in this disease process over the years, COPD is considered a chronic, debilitating and sometimes fatal disease. I am more concerned with the chronic part of this, I guess somewhere I held out hope in the RADs diagnosis that this would completely clear one day and Id return to a "normal life".

Well with that knowledge - I think I will concentrate on the "great advancements" that have been made in pharmaceutics enabling people with this condition to live not only longer but with a better quality of life than previously predicted. So stay tuned as we take this journey together, the drugs that the doctor has had me on have been, at least, holding the progression at bay. This is a good sign - at least as far as I'm concerned. I'm sure that there will be good days and bad days and I will more than likely be doing my entries on the bad days.

I hope that the weather warms back up a bit again, it was nice not to have my lungs burn in the cold.