I'm home, sick, once again. That cold I started getting on the weekend incited my lungs to riot, and so, lucky me! I was in the emergency room last night having ridiculous sessions of breathing treatments, resenting the perverseness of my pulmonary system, and obsessing over great big burritos and hot baths (it was cold in the ER, and I hadn't eaten all day).
Yesterday morning, for reasons I am still unable to fathom, I reckoned I was well enough to go to work, despite the fact that walking through my small house from the front door to the back door left me clutching the kitchen counter and hyperventilating in tiny little gasps. The only good thing that can be said for my sensibility was that I had the good damn sense not to try to ride my bike to work. I knew there was no way in seven hells I would make it up the big hill on 9th St. So I rode the bus to work.
I was home from work on Monday and Tuesday, and on Tuesday night was when my breathing started to really go south. I pretty much didn't sleep because I had to concentrate on breathing, and it was quite a bit of work. After a couple of hot showers, an hour or so of porch-sitting, and about 2 hours of fitful sleep, I decided it wasn't worth the bother and got up and folded laundry. I decided then that if I was well enough to do laundry, I was well enough to haul my carcass to work. So I went to work toughed the day out, walking slowly, surreptitiously hyperventilating, and talking like the bastard child of Marge Simpson and an accordian. By the time I got home, however, there was no denying that I was going to need professional help if I wanted to breathe like a regular human being again anytime soon. So I called my regular doctor's office, and the on-call doctor there told me to go on to the emergency room for a breathing treatment, which I subsequently did.
The usual hospital hijinks ensued. I think I told about 9 different people that I had a cold, I was a recently-diagnosed asthmatic, and I had been having trouble drawing a breath or getting much good out of the air I was breathing for the past two days. They gave me a prednisone tablet and quite a lot of albuterol treatment (and one other thing that I can't remember the name of), tested my wind a few dozen times, then sent me on my way with an Advair disc, a peak flow meter, and prescriptions for four more Prednisone tablets and a fresh albuterol inhaler. And an appointment to go to an asthma management workshop, which is something I'd been trying to get arranged for a while anyhow.
I've been wanting to go to a regular allergist and see about dealing with a few allergies I very well know I have. The Allegra is taking the edge off the worst of it–as in I'm not sneezing 24-7, but I still get asthma symptoms if I get exposed to an allergen quite a lot, like when I re-arranged my house and stirred up ever fleck of dust and cat dander that ever settled anywhere. I think if I could do better with my allergy management, the asthma management would fall right in with it. Anyway, I need to consult with somebody who is trained to help people deal with this kind of thing and find out what might be done. I'd really like not to go to the emergency room anymore if I could help it.