Enough With the Flippin’ Smoke!!!!

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We’ve got smoke again which is making the western sky look like a gigantic cigarette with the butt being a blood red sun.Â? As the parsonage is anything but air-tight, I guess I’ll be sleeping in the living room again as the downstairs bedroom collects the smoke.Â? It’s probably good that I have the Med-Neb machine on loan from the hospital.Â? I’ll probably need it in the next couple days.

It seems like every day brings a new fire or the explosion of an existing fire.Â? I don’t seem to remember it being this bad last year but we also probably didn’t have the amount of smoke that we do this year.

My dad suggested I walk around with a respirator but that would seem to be overkill.Â? I do know that I’ll be going out with a surgical mask or SOMETHING on until this foolishness ends…

This Is Getting So Old…

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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.

Update on Yesterday’s Prayer Request

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About 8:00 last night (after going upstairs to get a Harry Potter book and choking for 5 minutes), I told Jon that I wanted to go to the E.R. NOW.Â? We went in and thankfully the doc that knows me best was on call.Â? All I had to do was have him examine me and tell him that my peak flow was 300 (about 60% of what my norm is) and he got me hooked up to a nebulizer.Â? 10-15 minutes of nebulizer treatment opened everything up again and we were out of there by 9:30.

Right now, I’m doing fairly well — still not able to do a lot physically but that’s due more to the &^%$#%$ smoke from the forest fires west and south of us (ah… summer in Montana) that’s blowing this direction.Â? They gave me some surgical masks to wear for those times when I have to go outside and I have a feeling that I’m going to get some stares while walking to church tomorrow.Â? 😛

Prayer Request

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Do me a favor:

Please pray that my asthma problems and the nausea abate so that I don’t end up in the ER or admitted to the hospital tonight.Â? I’ve been having problems all day with breathing and dizziness and nausea.

Thanks