The Next Step

My life has changed since I returned home from vacation. It has been very challenging. It crept up on me. I don’t think I did anything wrong to make everything change. I knew this was coming but I didn’t think it would be so abrupt.

I went from sleeping and napping with my Bipap, to needing my Bipap to drive down to South Padre where we vacationed. While on vacation, I used my Bipap when I made dinner. When I saw a Neuromuscular doctor during the Summer, the doctor suggested a Trilogy machine. At the time, I didn’t think I was ready for that but when I returned home from vacation, I was thinking differently.

I started out using a spare Bipap machine in our family room when I was sitting to watch tv during awake time. I would take it off to make dinner and clean the kitchen. While in the kitchen, I would have trouble breathing. I got short of breath and had to take breaks with my Bipap on. I was exhausted when I finished cooking and cleaning up dinner dishes. I really started to struggle as the next couple of months went by. It wasn’t until I was in the bathroom and had to call for my husband to come help me out of the shower.

Having to need K to help me out of the shower was scary for both of us. My skin was turning grayish blue and I was desperate to get back to my Bipap machine. I had my oxygen at 10LPM and that still wasn’t enough. I went from 8LPM to 10LPM within 2 months time.

Because of this rapid change in my breathing, I decided to go ahead and get the ball rolling on getting me a Trilogy machine. I have it now. It’s a little awkward having to need to wear the mask all the time. Since the respiratory tech didn’t have the hose and mask that I wanted, I use the same mask & 10ft hose as the ones I used with my Bipap. The ten foot hose is handy when I want to park my Trilogy-on-wheels in a central location of my kitchen. This allows me to walk all over the place in the kitchen, dining room and into the laundry room. It’s weird wearing my Bipap mask all the time and being connected to a machine on a IV-like pole that has wheels. I’m just glad that most of my house has wood and tile flooring. Rolling it on a rug take more effort and tires me.

So, now I get to look glamorous! I pretend I’m acting as if I’m doing a Mars exploration experiment. Earth is Mars! The Trilogy is part of my space suit equipment! haha!

Using this machine is not difficult. It’s just requires me to figure out how to do things differently. Now I’m having to drag around a pole and try hard not to get my canula twisted around it or myself wrapped up in tubing. The pole is pretty darn sturdy but having the oxygen tubing attached to the machine wasn’t working for me. So, I moved it back to my mask’s oxygen bleed-in tube. You can see it in the picture shown below.

My biggest hurdle right now is trying to figure out how to wash my hair. I can’t be in the shower without the trilogy on and the trilogy can’t get moisture inside it. I can’t shower with just oxygen on anymore. The last time I tried it was a disaster. Ugh! I got as far as washing my hair and I had to get out. *cue K running to help me*

I would like to hear from the people who use a Trilogy full time. How do you manage to wash your hair if you can’t take this mask off? If I can’t figure it out, I’m going to have to ask for help from K and I don’t want to add one more thing to his growing list of things to do. I want to be as independent as possible.

I had my first outing with my trilogy machine. We now have a lot of stuff hanging off my wheelchair. Two oxygen portables hang off the handle bars and the trilogy sits in my lap because we haven’t figured out a better way to transport it without K having to carry it. Leaving the house wearing it was awkward. I internally gave myself a pep talk once we exited our vehicle. People stare. I know that and it’s fine with me. I am still in that stage where I’m accepting this new phase of my life. I’m doing ok with it. It makes my life a little easier in the ways that I need it to. So, I’m thankful.

What matters is that I’m still alive and I can still smile. It’s hard to eat with this on and I have to use a straw to drink from a cup. But, hey! I’m still alive!!!! Hooray!


Trilogy Evo Machine

My new life’s adventure.

Day Two… It continues.. Tikosyn!

Living On Oxygen for Life

There is one thing I want to bring up about the first day that I failed to mentioned in my earlier post about Day One. I’m still pretty upset about it. In fact, at the time, K and I were both very upset and flabbergasted about the whole incident. You see… when I have to stay in the hospital, I naturally bring along my bipap machine so that I can immediately have it available to use and I also bring all of my medicine. All of my medicine includes my specialty medicine which I know that hospitals, even though they are hospitals with lots and lots of drugs, may not have a supply of my specialty medicine. When I went to the Dallas hospital in 2014, that hospital didn’t have my Opsumit, that I was taking (no longer taking now!), in their pharmacy.

On the 26th of May, my first day of hospital stay, the hospital realized that they didn’t have Tracleer in their pharmacy. The nurse came to tell us in my room and I said that’s no problem because this has happened to me before in 2014 in a Dallas hospital. I brought my Tracleer with me in it’s bottle. The pharmacist can inspect it, slap a patient label on it and put it in their pharmacy locker to dispense out to me. The nurse went to call the pharmacy to see if that was ok to do. She came back and told me the hospital pharmacy said they couldn’t do that, saying something about a law? *shrug* I told the nurse that I can not be without this medicine. The pharmacy looked around for a small supply of Tracleer 62.5mg and found some all the way in Dallas that they were going to have brought to Fort Worth for me that night. I was so mad. I was mad because I had my medicine not but one foot from me and they wouldn’t allow me to offer it to take. I was mad because the hospital had someone in Dallas drive in pouring down rain and hail to bring to it to me to use. AND I was mad because I knew this medicine costs $8500 for a month supply and I didn’t want an exorbitant charge for Tracleer on my bill when I have mine to take that the insurance has already paid for when all they had to do is inspect mine and put a patient label on it. Sorry, but I’m still really upset about this.

Ok…Day Two.. It was much better than day one…although, I didn’t get to sleep until 2am because the last vital check was at midnight and I couldn’t fall asleep until 2am. I’m a night person naturally but I was getting in that zone where if I get too tired, I can’t fall asleep. That’s a very bad thing for me to have happen. I will start to feel physically sick. At 4am, it was Tikosyn time! Then nearly 5am, they came in to take vitals and shortly afterwards, the lab lady came in to take blood. Do you see a pattern here? Anytime I would nearly fall back asleep, I’d get woken back up and by 6am it was time for the EKG. By then, I just decided to stay awake and wake for breakfast and K to arrive. And don’t forget the diuretics to begin. They had all my medicine split apart and coming to me at different times. It was crazy because I was so use to taking morning meds when I woke up and then evening medicines right around 5 or 6pm.

I drew this picture and stuck it on the bathroom door. You see me on the island?

K scooted into the hospital right before the doctor showed up and I had my list of questions ready. I think he was impressed because I had them listed on a small notebook I brought in case I needed it. (I highly recommend this!) My doctor noticed that I had my yarn out and had asked if I crocheted. I was impressed that he knew what crocheting was and told him that K calls it knitting. The doctor said crocheting and knitting aren’t the same.. I felt like we had a bonding moment there. haha! He looked around the room and noticed my sign on the bathroom door. I’m so goofy!

This was the worse meal I had at the hospital. Plus it had pepper on it.

The food here was something else. I was stuck choosing from the Heart Healthy diet on a paper menu but I started to get smart by penciling in requests like a bagel and a chocolate chip cookie. The bagel, I got! The extra chocolate chip cookie, I did not. *pout* However, K did go down to the in-house Starbucks and bought us some goodies. For him, he bought a couple of blueberry muffins.. the kind with crumble topping… and for me, 2 chocolate chip cookies of which he snagged one. By the way, all the vending machines in the hospital only had healthy selections..even the soda or other beverages were diet. Gross! After lunch, I couldn’t believe I was able to get a 2 hour nap. It was AWESOME! Then K was like, let’s get your butt up and walk the hall. We did this the first day and he won’t let me get lazy just because we’re in the hospital because he knows that the more time I spend in that bed, the more my lungs lose function and I can have a set back. So, staying active was our main goal. As long as I wasn’t dizzy or woozy, I walked twice a day with him.. or my nurse tech when K had to go home for the night to take care of some errands for his mom and take care of our dog.

K use to sing and act out this song by the Beatles (A Day in a Life) for me.

After hanging my motivational picture on the bathroom door, I wrote on the patient information board. It’s a dry-erase board in my room. I wrote my Day’s Goal as to “Be A Ray of Sunshine.” Cute, huh? [Picture shown on Day Three post] I wrote it because I was so cranky the previous day. Before K left for home and while I was in the bathroom, he wrote me a goodbye motivational message on the board that he knew I would know what it meant. I came out of the bathroom and saw that he was guarding it so that I couldn’t see what it was that he wrote. I was thinking that he wrote something to the nurses to get me to walk that evening. I mean, he kissed me goodnight and made me pinkie-swear to walk that night no matter what. I thought it was so cute that he would pinkie-swear with me that I just went ahead and pinkie-sweared. Well, when I read what he wrote on the board, I almost cried. I know that to you it’s just lyrics to a Beatles song but to me, it’s a happy memory that makes me laugh out loud. He’s so good at writing the perfect thing that will touch my heart and lift me up.

On the second day of my hospital stay, the labs came back with an even higher than MY normal of CO2 (or bicarbonate) level. The doctor was concerned, thinking that he should adjust my diuretics but I told him that I have normally high bicarb and my kidney does a good job at balancing my pH level. I told him that I would prefer that he would consult with my PH doctor before changing any diuretic she prescribed. Personally, I don’t like one doctor messing with another doctor’s orders. He did say that he was ok with that and he agreed with not changing her orders but he was going to watch it. That doctor is my Pulmonary Hypertension doctor and there are good reasons why I’m on the medication that I am on. I brought a 15 page history of my major health history (with test results) just in case something went wrong and they’d need more information. I even gave it to my nurse, which she copied, but I don’t think the doctor even looked at. I don’t know for sure but I did it because I’ve never been to that hospital before. I do what I can not to only protect myself but also to protect K in the event that if something happened during this stay in the hospital, he’ll know what to do to get information he needs about me to make the right decisions.

Apparently, at the starting dose of Tikosyn, which is the higher dose, my QT Interval was too long on the second day. The doctor had to make an adjustment to my dose that evening. I was now taking the lowest dose.. 125mcg twice a day. He told me that by the last (5th dose) and after the EKG, he would know if they could send me home with or without the medicine. Remember, anything under 500 is good.

I’m facing a decision that scares the heck out of me.

Living On Oxygen for Life

Let me set the scene for you, if you will allow me. *grin* You know I love a good story, yet this one is a hum-dinger! About a week ago, I put in a request for a refill of my heart medicine. It’s the heart medicine that helps with my Ventricular Arrhythmias and it’s called Cordarone. Now, mind you… I can take BRAND NAME only because the generic drug, Amiodarone and Pacerone, causes horrible headaches. I’ve tried a multitude of other heart medicines back in 1993 but they all affected my breathing causing severe shortness of breath.

So, I wondered why, when I got the email from my mail order pharmacy, which said that my Cordarone refill has been delayed. A few days later I called the pharmacy and asked wha’s up… you know? *raised eyebrow* This isn’t something I can go without. They told me that the medicine is no longer in stock and they didn’t have a date of when it would be arriving. That set off serious alarm bells in my head.

I went into my bathroom where my Cordarone bottle is and looked at the name of the manufacturer. Pfizer! Then I searched online to find their phone number to give them a jingle on my telephone. You know, just to ask them, wha’ up? I mean… seriously! I explained my situation about this is the only medicine my lungs can tolerate and I really need this drug. (Honestly, I was starting to freak out.) The people at Pfizer were super nice. They even put me on hold to find out what the problem was but they did NOT come back with good news. In fact, it was horrible news. Cordarone, they said, has been discontinued. But hey, there’s still the generic drug. UGH! I explained to them that I can NOT take that medicine.

After that call, I immediately called my doctor, who is a Cardiac Electrophysiology specialist, to tell them what happened and to beg them for an earliest doctor appointment available which was Monday. I went to the appointment but not only did I arrive to the wrong office (they have multiple offices!) but I had to beg them on the phone to allow me to still come in to see them instead of rescheduling. Can you imagine how stressed out I was? I had only 40 minutes to get to their office which was in a different city and there was major traffic but I made it and in one piece! Yay me!

Ok, so I’m in the doctor’s office talking it up with an older man about his mother needing oxygen. I guess when people see me they just naturally start talking with me or I’ll give them a friendly smile and they we’ll just start talking. I hate sitting in a quiet place waiting to be called. I naturally want to talk. *shrug*

I was able to talk with the Nurse Practitioner (because the doctor was out of country for the next week) for nearly an hour and it turns out that the only medicine that I could switch to is… That’s right… Tikosyn (I was offered that about 2 years ago and turned down but now I have no choice.) which requires a 3 day stay in a hospital to start it. To start this drug, I will have to stop Cordarone for 2 weeks prior to starting Tikosyn. If Tikosyn doesn’t work, I’m screwed. My other alternative is to try to buy Cordarone from Turkey through a Canadian pharmacy to fall back on in case Tikosyn doesn’t work. I’ve tried to buy it in the past from Canada, but they sent me Pacerone instead. I’m super, super stressed out… I need brand name. I have 28 Cordarone pills left. K took the news as well as expected. I’m going to call my doctor tomorrow and tell her I’m going to try Tikosyn.

K and I remember the experience I went through back in 1993 with my heart skipping constantly and it was not a good experience. We are going to try to make the 2 weeks without Cordarone as “low stress” as possible. Stress really effects my heart rhythm.

My only thought yesterday was … I really hope K brings home some ice cream for me. I could really use some. He did. He knew I needed it. I ate the whole pint last night. And it was delicious! Who knew Twix ice cream could taste so good??? Ok that’s my update.

Hey don’t forget to donate to my Need a Hug Project fund! I can’t wait to show you the afghan I’m nearly finished with. The donate button is on the right!

[March 2016]