Jenny, bless her heart, left me a comment on my last post asking how she could pray for me. That was pretty humbling given that she’s going through some pretty tough stuff as well.

As far as praying for me, I’m doing OK right now — bad weeks happen and like all things, they too shall pass.Â? If you want to pray, pray that my meds keep working and that the shadow times are few and far between.Â? When I’m in the midst of those times, just pray that I see God’s presence close to me and don’t despair.

To the crud in my face/throat/lungs,

GO AWAY!!!!!!!!!!!Â? I’ve been miserably sick (but not sick enough to ditch work) for three days now and I’d like to actually be able to breathe, talk, and taste food again.

When I was shopping today, the lane I was in for checking out had the fresh French bread next to it… and the bakery people were inviting people to feeeeeel the warm bread not to mention the smell wafting about.

Evil carb dealers!!!

(And of course, I had to get some and have a couple pieces when I got home because it was still warm.Â? And I missed the call from the nurse regarding my bloodwork which was probably not good and means that I’ll get a “get your butt down here” summons tomorrow.Â? Well… that or yelled at for eating the French bread.)

I woke up this morning wanting to die due to my lungs being so irritated.Â? I was in respiratory distress during church so I told Jon after the service that I was headed to town to the ER.Â? (For new readers, we live 25 miles from the town where we do errands so there wasn’t much I could really do.)Â? Several people offered to take me in but I insisted that I could drive myself.

Well… I get there and the nurses aren’t sure what to do with me.Â? I guess they called the on-call physician and before he got there, he told them to nebulize me.Â? So… they come in brandishing a peakflow meter and the nebulizer tubing and tell me that they need to do some baseline peakflows.Â? I grabbed my nice peakflow meter (which is marked with the correct numbers for ME as my peakflows tend to run 100 points higher than normal), gave them a lovely one showing that I was in my respiratory distress zone, and watched the nurse fumbling to put together the neb tubing.

I wasn’t more than 2 minutes into my breathing treatment (and quite enjoying the fact that my lungs weren’t hurting when Dr. Idiot walks in and starts asking me questions.Â? OK… I have something in my mouth giving me something to open my lungs — do you really think that this is the time to inquisition me???Â? (I ended up giving him hand motions.)Â? He ended up asking more questions about my blood sugar at which point I reminded him that I was there for my ASTHMA.Â? Verdict: my lungs are irritated (no joke!) and I’m on Robitussin DM to try and get the small amount of crap in my chest out as well as Aleve to kill the pain.Â? I need to check in with a doctor at the clinic in the middle of this week (I’m hieing it to my mafioso doc on Tuesday as he saw me in the ER on Friday and knows what’s up) and meanwhile, I have a lovely portable nebulizer and solution on loan from the respiratory therapy department at the hospital.Â? Dr. Idiot thinks that the irritation is due to all the smoke from the fires (ya think?) and I’m sure that it being harvest time (and thus having dust and junk) in the air isn’t helping.

So… I’ll go give myself a treatment in a bit and I currently have the windows open upstairs to try and get the nasty old air out of my treehouse (the third floor where my study is) as it’s a nice day outside and the Skyland fire doesn’t seem to be belching smoke our way.Â?Â? Let me just say though… I’m getting sick of having my asthma irritated by all this.