Archives: Antibiotics

Well, someone was listening to me last night, because today has, indeed, been a better day so far. That’s not to say things are all fine and dandy, or that the picture is yet all rosy, but side-by-side with yesterday, today has been a Good Day.

I managed to get almost straight to sleep last night, sometime after 11pm, which is rare forr me these days. Not only that, but I managed to sleep quite solidly, too – no constant waking to switch position or readjust myself. It may have been thanks to having fiddled with Neve and pushed the pressures up ever-so-slightly, or a slightly improvement on the chest front, or simply thanks to complete exhaustion and my body not having any other choice but sleeping it off. My guess would be it was a healthy mix of the three.

Bizarrely, and somewhat annoyingly, I woke up bright-as-a-button(ish) around 5am and couldn’t get back to sleep, no matter how hard I tried. I had planned to lay in a bit today and do my morning dose a little later than usual, but given that I was awake anyway, I decided to switch the plans and get up early and get them out of the way, which would have the knock-on effect of allowing me an earlier night tonight.

I got up, got my dose running and sat myself a the computer to surf around and catch up on the over-night writers’ strike news, during which time my chest was doing all kinds of weird things, making me breathless one minute and fine the next, and I developed a bit of a killer headache.

By the time my drugs had finished, I decided it’d be a good idea to try to get some physio out of the way before I got myself back to bed, so I did another very uncomfortable session – very hard work again. Having said which, I definitely felt the benefit afterwards, even through it didn’t feel like I’d cleared a lot. I did my anti-biotic nebs and then took myself to bed around 9am.

Interestingly, for those who keep tabs on this sort of thing, 9am is also the time that the construction workers begin work on resurfacing the road outside the front of where we live. With the sun beating a nice, hot set of rays down on the bedroom window, keeping them shut was out of the question, so keeping the noise out was also not a part of the plan.

As it happened, noisy as they were, I needed sleep more, and I managed to doze on-and-off for another few hours till the early afternoon.

I rolled out of bed feeling much better for the physio and sleep, grabbed a cuppa with K and chatted for a bit, talked to my ‘rents to catch them up on over-night progress and then headed back for more physio. It was a much better session than this mornings, and much easier, too, making things look brighter already.

After physio, I got some calories down me and then headed back to bed to chill out with K and watch the first ep of the first season of 24 – a season I’ve seen but K hasn’t and is next on our TV-DVD marathon. I’m amazed at how much I don’t remember from the first time it aired, and also at how much of what I do remember they’ve crammed into the first ep – there must be a whole heap more that I don’t remember to come, which is promising.

After chilling in bed for a while, K gets up to do some more revision and I sit and read GQ for a while, before K heads off to college and I do my 3rd physio session of the day. I’m determined to crack the back of this while I can.

Physio out of the way, I jump online for a while and do a bit of Chrimbo shopping (have to bow to the inevitable eventually, I suppose) and look into a couple of other random bits and pieces while the Shepherd’s Pie Mum made me yesterday cooks.  I sit and eat it while watching the last episode of Extras from the DVD that I’d never got round to seeing, then wash up and get back to the study, going over a couple of old scripts till K gets home.

We watch some programmes from Sky+ and I do some more physio (a really good late-night session, actually), and before I know it my evening drugs are all done and it’s time to hit the sack.  Things are still very up-and-down, and I suspect they will be for a good few days yet, but today’s been a massive improvement on yesterday, and that’s a big step forward.  Well, at least a little one.

Today has been, hands down, one of the hardest days I’ve had in a very long while – harking back really as far as my admission in June, where every day was a challenge.

Luckily, the benefit of hindsight and such tells me that it’s not quite that bad – one horrible day in a week can’t possibly be as bad as one passable day in a week – but it’s only thanks to a little bit of let-up in the relentless onslaught of tiredness, breathlessness and exhaustion that allows me an ounce of philosophy in my outlook.

It started, oddly, not too badly – I woke this morning having had very little sleep but not feeling too bad about it. I clearly had a lot on my chest, but was also managing to get quite a bit off just by being up and about. Early mornings are usually the time when you find out what kind of crap is on your chest, since the very process of getting up and moving around tends to make you cough and splutter, which in turn lets you see a) how productive you are b) how easily it’s moving and c) how out-of-breath it makes you when you do.

I was moving stuff pretty easily, although it was exhausting to cough and my throat was still causing problems with getting the big lumps up. (Nice, I know, but this is a full-disclosure blog, so if you don’t like it it’s not for you, I guess!). Having got my morning dose of drugs out of the way, I crawled back to bed feeling breathless but not too bad.

I woke again around 12.30, later than I’d planned and wanted to. With a 2.30 appointment in Oxford, I’d have to be out of the house in under an hour, so would need to pick and choose the most important elements out of bathing, dressing, eating, doing physio and doing nebs, as well as getting my things together for the Oxford trip (it always involves taking a book things as well as my physio-helping device, which all need to be collected into a bag – it may not sound like much but believe me, it was a task-and-a-half today).

I settled on food and nebs being the two most important things, so threw on some clothes in a very slow and deliberate manner and made a sandwich, which I sat and munched before doing a neb and collecting my things, all of which filled the next 45 minutes and made me incredibly, uncomfortably breathless.

At Oxford things didn’t improve a whole lot. My nurse changed my port needle, which was fine with the exception of the bioclusive (clear plastic) dressing pulling off a good chunk of surface skin by my under-arm area, which was then healthily swabbed with alcohol prior to the insertion of the new needle. Yes, it smarts.

My physio session was really, really hard work – harder than I’ve had for a long time. I was breathless, tired and my airways were irritable and not playing ball, the gunk on my chest refusing to be moved around and brought up, so it felt like we weren’t really achieving much.

Seeing as I’m now sliding into my 4th week on IVs, the team wanted me to check in with the Doc to see if they wanted to do anything different. I’m loathe to change anything at the moment for several reasons, partially because I believe that once I’ve kicked the cold the drugs will do their job, but mostly because any change in IVs is likely to mean switching to one that I don’t get on with quite so well, which in turn would mean that they’d have to have me in and on the ward for a few days so they could keep an eye on me. I’m not keen on the ward at the best of times, but when I’m not getting a whole lot of sleep at home, it’s even less appealing because I know that I won’t get any on the ward.

While I was waiting to be fitted into the doc’s queue, I had another fantastic session of physio with the wonderful back/neck specialist, who worked me over really well. She did what she calls “mobilizing the joints” followed by “mobilizing the soft tissue”. One of the nurses said that the soft-tissue stuff looked like a massage to her, but the physio helpfully pointed out that the big difference was that massages are pleasurable.

Neck attacked, I popped across to the clinic to catch up with the doc, who reluctantly agreed to give the drugs a few days to see if they can kick in after the cold. We agreed that if things are no better by the weekend, then I’ll be straight in. If I’m picking up they’ll leave me out and check my progress after the weekend and we’ll see where we stand.

By this time it was well after 4.30, which meant a slow journey home in the evening traffic. We made an executive decision to take the scenic route which, although dark and not at all scenic, would at least guarantee that we’d be back inside an hour and a half, which is impossible to be sure of if you take the A34.

Back home just after 6 I was completely exhausted, to the level of a childish sense of having no idea what to do with myself. Every single part of me wanted to go to sleep, but I knew if I did I would have no chance at all of getting to sleep. Instead, I sat myself in the study chair to be as comfy as possible and surfed the ‘net for a while, before hopping into a bath to try and freshen up a bit.

It worked – to a limited extent – and we then managed to get through our usual Wednesday night where our bestest bud Dazz pops in to catch up on a Sky+’d ep of Entourage (our guilty pleasure) followed by this week’s Heroes.

With those out of the way, I didn’t have much else to do with myself than dump my exhuasted, knackered, b*ggered old body in the sack and pray for a good night’s sleep. And while I was there, I put in a small request to have a better day tomorrow, please, too.

I’m feeling awful at the moment – my cold has hit with a vengeance and is dragging me down big-style.  Most irritatingly, it’s gone to my throat, which makes clearing all the usual gunk off my chest incredibly hard as a tickly cough makes doing good-quality physio almost impossible.  Coupled with that, obviously, the gunk that is there anyway (which isn’t getting cleared) is now getting thicker and heavier and nastier with all the cold bugs in it, too, which is making breathing and life in general incredibly hard.  It’s basically one great big heap of can’t-breathe-very-well, feel-like-cr@p, need-to-sleep-for-weeks poo.

Of course, me being me, the easiest and most obvious course of action is also the one that my body objects to the most, namely sleeping.  Because of all the rubbish on my chest which I’m not clearing, I’m loaded up with stuff which is making breathing hard anyway, but as soon as I try to go anywhere near horizontal (or even just slightly leaned-over) it all starts rumbling around even more and giving me even more problems.

So last night I managed a grand total of about 2 hours sleep and that was taken pretty much because my body literally couldn’t keep my eyes open and my brain turned on any more.  No matter what position I was in I would be in some form of discomfort, which was either back pain, shoulder pain, chest pain or all three combined with inability to breathe.  I tell you something, struggling to breathe on a machine that’s suppose to help you breathe is not a pleasant sensation.

So last night wasn’t good and this morning wasn’t much brighter – what with the distinct lack of rest and still rumbling chest.

I have, however, made it through to the afternoon now and things are brightening up ever so slightly.  My biggest problem has been getting comfortable, as whenever my breathing becomes a problem now it causes all sorts of chain-reactions through the rest of my body, specifically back and neck pain which makes sitting in most positions either painful or hard to breathe.

Most annoyingly, it’s the positions you would imagine to be the most comfortable that I struggle with the most – sitting on the sofa causes huge neck pain, sitting in bed causes lower-back pain and breathlessness and sitting in the comfy chair in the living room causes one of the two, depending on how I sit.

Ironically, sitting bolt upright in the desk chair at the computer is currently my most chest-friendly position.  I’ve been in front of the screen for a little over 3 hours now and I’m feeling the best I have all day.  I suppose there’s no excuse for me not being productive, is there?  Although my brain isn’t entirely switched on at the moment.

Anyway, I thought I’d take the opportunity to catch up on some online diarizing and catching up on the US Writer’s Strike, which has got me bizarrely hooked.

I’m hoping a better day, a better throat and some better physio means that I’ll be able to get better sleep tonight and things will duly improve tomorrow.  The resurgence of the cold has coincided once again with the scheduled end-of-IVs, so I’ll be back at Oxford tomorrow but look set to continue into a 4th week of the mega-drugs.  Better than ending up feeling even worse and going back on them in a week or two anyway.

It’s been a nervous 24 hours here since the cold reared its head and it was made all the worse last night after I spotted a problem with the line into my port through which I give my IV’s.

I noticed while I was doing my afternoon dose that the line had gone a little cloudy, but didn’t think much of it.  By the evening dose, it hadn’t cleared up (as sometimes happens) and had a couple of distinct breaks in the cloudiness which started to concern me slightly.

Anyone with a port-a-cath will tell you how protective they are of them, not least people in my position as the loss of use of a post through breakage or – God forbid – infection is a serious problem: replacing ports is not the kind of thing that can be done on a whim and while it isn’t what you’d term “major” surgery, it’s certainly more than most doctors would like to be performing on someone with end-stage lung disease.

With all these thoughts running through my head, I took the executive decision to not give my next dose of IV’s until I’d been to Oxford to get it looked at and replace the needle and line for a new one.

After a late-night phone call with Mum, we hastily arranged a lunch-time pick up when she finished work (trampling all over any other plans for the day she may have had) and I settled down for the night after pumping another mini-monsoon of First Defence up my nose and downing a handful of Vitamin C caps to try to ward the cold off, too.

For once I slept absolutely beautifully.  Without my morning dose of dugs to do, I slept clean through till 10am, when K’s alarm woke me.  Lucky it did, really, because it didn’t wake her, so she’d have been in a spot if it weren’t for my eagle-eyed sense of hearing. (Yeah, I know, that confused me, too.)  That said, I’m sure she’ll jump to defend herself having already been out of bed once to answer the door to a nice delivery man.

A quick call to my team in Oxford and the ever-brilliant Cass opened up a slot for me early in the afternoon.  I checked with Mum and we were all good to shoot on over once she’d got her morning at work out of the way.

I got up slowly and rumbled around the house, hesitantly waiting for the cold to hit with full force, but nothing really materialised.  My sinuses were much less clogged and though I struggled a little with my physio first thing, I managed to clear a good bit and get my nebs done before Mum arrived.  I grabbed some Lucozade for the journey and hopped in the car, leaving K at home for a study session with a college-mate.

Cass looked me over and gave my port a quick once-over and agreed that it didn’t seem to be anything too untoward, although she’d never seen anything like it either.  She swapped my needle out and reaccessed me, giving it a good flush to check it out and all seemed well.  We agreed that although the cold doesn’t seem to have taken hold, an extra week on the IVs wasn’t going to do any harm.  I can’t have been there more than 20 minutes before Mum whisked me off again, but it was worth the 3 hour round trip for the piece of mind it gave me.

We got home just before half-three and I connected up my afternoon dose of IVs and hit the sack to recharge my batteries.  I woke an hour later feeling really quite energised, hit my nebs and did some physio before dinner.

I think – touch wood – I’ve managed to ward the cold off, so am hoping that another good night’s rest and another day not doing too much should keep me back on the well-wagon and I can look forward to another weekend with family and friends.

Off to catch tonight’s episode of Heroes now – we’re all addicted and we’re only a few weeks from the end of the season!  Hooray!

Not much more to say, really.  Am feeling utterly deflated that at the end of 2 weeks’ IVs which have boosted me rather wonderfully and got me feeling very good and positive, I wake up this morning with puffy, stuffy sinuses and a whisper of a headache, which has spent the day hovering between going away and worsening into full-blown cold.

There’s not a lot I can do to keep it from setting in full-blown, I don’t think, certainly no more than I’m trying, which is lots of rest with lots of calories and spraying First Defence up my nose like teenage boys spray cologne on a night out.  The plus side, I suppose, is that at least I don’t smell as bad as they do.

Thinking about it, I suppose I have to take the blame for the onset of the cold, since I did make the mistake of saying yesterday that I wanted to be productive today and get things done.  If this blog has proven one thing over the last 12 months, it’s that whenever I talk about getting things done, something crops up to get in the way of it.  I really should learn just to keep my mouth shut.

Realistically, it’s more likely than not that the cold is simply my body’s reaction to a frantically busy weekend – it’s a long time since I’ve had 3 night’s of “entertainment” in a row and although I rested a lot in the day times, it must still have worn me down.

It’s frustrating and – as always – a little scary to be coming down with something, but at least I have the security of knowing that I’m getting it at my very best point physically.  I’m just a day from finishing IV’s (which will now be extended by another week to cover any knock-on effects from the cold) and still on steroids, which means my appetite is good, my chest is as good as it ever gets and I’m firing on as many cylinders as I’ve got.  If there is ever a “good” time to get a cold when you’re aware of the possible consequences to a pair of dodgy blowers, this is it.

So I’m off to get some more physio done, shovel down some more food, suck down some more Lucozade and pray to the Big Guy to keep this one mild.  All help appreciated, if you’re so inclined.

I haven’t been this excited about random developments for ages. I don’t think I’ve actually EVER been this excited about developments relating to fitness-type stuff. But I’ve just climbed off the shiny new exercise bike sat not 3 feet from this screen and I feel fantastic – this biking lark seems like it might just be the key to breaking the back of this fitness-malarky.

It’s such a bizarre feeling to sit on the bike and be doing real, proper exercise but not to feel completely breathless and deflated by the whole thing – to find a type of fitness which is enjoyable and beneficial without being a real battle of will power to push through the pain/breathlessness barrier.

It appears that the slower slope of desaturisation that I was talking about yesterday is much more significant than I’d first thought and that I can actually go a lot longer on the bike than I’d hoped without gasping for air or feeling like I’m going to keel off it. Rather, I can actually get to a stage where I can really feel the muscles in my legs being worked hard and doing some stretching and improving of their own.

It’s indescribable to feel that I’ve found something which can make the “working” parts of my body feel included in the day-to-day running of life – like their being paid at least a cursory bit of attention rather than being glossed over in the fight to keep the lungs ticking over.

I keep having all sorts of qualifiers about the relation of current treatment/steroids etc to the improvement in my chest and exercise tolerance and everything else swirling around my head at the moment, but right now I feel so good, so happy, that I don’t want to sit here and qualify things.

It’s not often these days that I get a chance to just sit and be excited about something going well. And I know that “not-so-good” may be just around the corner – as it is for all of us – so I’m blowed if I’m going to sit here and not let myself enjoy this feeling for tonight.

I’ve found something I can do physically that doesn’t make me 2nd best to a 3-year-old child and much as you may laugh, that’s a really, really big thing for me. Tonight, even if it’s “for one night only”, I’m enjoying it.

Big smiles and hugs to all!

Up to Oxford today for my mid-IV once-over, during which all signs were pointing to “pretty good”.  “Good” is obviously a relative term, but compared to last week, where I was perched on the verge of a bit of a down-turn, things are doing pretty well.

Lung function is up to 0.75/1.5 from 0.7/1.2, which is a goodly leap (18%/30% from 17%/24%) in the space of a week, my sats are holding steady around the 90% mark on 2l O2 per minute and my exercise tolerance is improving.

Yesterday we took delivery of a brand new exercise bike from the lovely Fitness for Hire, a company who loan out exercise equipment so you can see whether or not you’re likely to get into the habit of using it without throwing away a whole heap of dough on something that’s just going to sit and gather dust.  We’ve loaned it for 4 weeks for starters and if it doesn’t get used, it’ll just go back, no hassle.

The theory is, according to the Physios-Who-Know, that working on a bike is easier on the chest/lungs than step-ups with Goliath as the tendency is not to desaturate so quickly.  I don’t know why that is, or exactly how the process works, but what it basically means is that by using the bike I will be able to do more exercise without getting so out of breath.  This, in turn, should mean that I can make my muscles do more work, rather than my lungs stopping me before my muscles really get a work out, and the muscular improvment will serve to improve the flow and use of oxygen around the body, meaning that I require less oxygen to do everyday tasks, which means I get less breathless while doing them.

Theory is all well and good, but we know how my body likes to throw googlies (or curveballs, if you’re more comfortable with the American vernacular), so having the option to bail out on the purchase of a hefty piece of equipment is a good option for right now.

I have to say, having had a wee spin on a bike at Oxford today, it certainly looks promising as a less intense form of exercise.  Obviously, there are different levels of resistance and speed settings and a whole host of other options, but the great thing about it is that the very basic starting point is easily managable, giving a lot more leeway in terms of turning things up or down as my chest may dictate from day-to-day.  The trouble with step-ups is that they are very set-in-stone – it’s a set distance, with a set weight (my body-weight), over a set time.  The bike, on the other hand, has myriad ways of making things easier or harder as my body goes through it’s yo-yo routine.

Once again – and as usual – we’ll wait and see what comes of it.  I don’t want to get too over-excited at something that’s just going to fall by the wayside again, but the promise is there for something with potential.

Sadly no progress on the script today, because the trip to Oxford has pretty much sucked the energy out of me, so it’s probably a night in front of the TV tonight, maybe catching a flick or something.  But it’s been a positive day, so I’m not going to moan about a little bit of tiredness at the end of it.

Today I am tired. Today made no sense. I think it’s because I’m tired. But really, it made no sense.

I woke up this morning at 6.30am – that’s really early. Luckily, it’s not dark, because the clocks have gone back. So I woke up in the light. But it was still really early. I didn’t get much sleep last night. It was past midnight when the light went out and I then spent the next hour or so getting to sleep, where I then spent the next four or five hours dozing and waking every hour or so to readjust my position because either a) Neve was coming off my face, b) my shoulder was hurting because of the port needle or c) I was lying too much over on my chest and giving myself breathing trouble.

I woke up grouchy. I don’t think many people wake up at 6.30am happy, but when you’ve slept badly two nights in a row, coupled with not sleeping long enough two nights in a row, coupled with being on really high doses of the most drowsy-making drugs in the world (with the notable exception, perhaps of sleeping pills, which I suppose really ought to win the most drowsy-making award and if they don’t then they should really have a different name, or get their makers sued under trading standards) then it’s pretty hard to wake up at 6.30 in the morning without being grouchy.

I did my drugs. This involves (at the moment) doing about 10-15 minutes worth of injecting solutions from a syringe down the tube then connecting up a big bubble-thing which works like a drip, but in a different way. (That doesn’t make sense, does it? If it works like a drip, then it must be a drip; if it works a different way then it’s not like a drip, is it? Told you today didn’t make sense.) That takes an hour to go through, then it’s a couple of quick syringe squirts and hey presto, all done.

So the whole shebang took me up to about 8am. Every Monday morning, I have a delivery of portable oxygen cylinders to give me enough to move around for the week when I want to go out. Invariably, the delivery driver arrives at 9am. Looking at the clock, tired and grouchy, I decided I didn’t want to go back to bed for an hour just to get woken up as I settle into a nice sleep to have to get up and answer the door. So I try to occupy myself to keep myself awake until 9.

Dutifully, the lovely Brummy gent turns up and drops of my new cylinders and whisks away my old ones. Following which I retire to bed for a catch-up nap, aware that I have to be up no later than 11.30 to get ready to go to the hospital for a physio appointment and drug-level check.

I clamber into bed and strap on my Neve-mask, only to discover that the condensation in the mask has done something – I don’t know what and boy, do I wish I did – which makes something on the mask make a really loud, annoying clunking sound every. Single. Time. I. Breathe. In.

Annoying? Slightly. Grumpy-making? Exceedingly.

After, oh I don’t know…. 5 minutes of trying, I give up and clamber out of bed, thoroughly bad-mooded for the day. I wash the mask up, in an effort to have cleared whatever the problem is for tonight, and sit myself quietly on the sofa to start reading Ian McEwan’s Atonement, which I’ve finally wrestled from K and am keen to get through before having the whole story spoiled for me by people who’ve seen the movie.

Bizarrely, all the time I’m sitting reading, I’m perfectly awake and alert, despite having had not enough sleep and being beside-myself with tiredness when I’d gone back to bed. As soon as I got up from my perch, however – to make tea, to fetch things, to do anything at all, really – I was exhausted. My chest was heaving, my legs felt like lead and my eyes couldn’t have been heavier if they’d entered a Weight Watchers programme and won the prize for world’s worst dieter by gaining their own body-weight three times over.

I was not a happy bunny.

By the time K got up I was happily reading away, but ready for some morning physio, which is never fun at the best of times but when you’re tired it becomes a peculiar kind of torture – long, drawn out, unpleasant, occasionally painful, sometimes exhausting, often breathless and very, very hot (this morning, anyway). Needless to say I ended in a mildly worse mood than I start – impressive, huh?

I did manage to lever myself into a bath and chill out for a fraction of an hour before throwing some clothes on and getting ready to head off to Oxford, only to be phoned and told that the physio I was supposed to be seeing had broken her tooth and wouldn’t be able to see me today, so could I come Wednesday instead? Of course, I said. Why not?

But here’s the weird thing: having not gone to Oxford, which I took to be a blessing on account of my overwhelming tiredness anyhow, my body then decided that actually, it was feeling pretty happy and perky. After 5 hours semi-sleep, a 6.30am start, a morning of trial after mood-blackening trial, I found myself suddenly feeling an urge to sit at my keyboard and write – to carry on with my screenplay with which I have been having so many recent tussles. (For “tussles”, read: “hit a structural bump which sapped all creativity and forward-momentum and left a big black mark against my 5-page-per-day copy book for the last month or so”)

So all afternoon I’ve been beavering away on my screenplay without so much as a care in the world, pausing only for the occasional break for food, water or the odd episode of Lost (just keeps getting better).

I have no idea what my brain is doing with itself, nor what my body is up to at the moment. My chest feels like it’s improving, but my sleep certainly isn’t. My mind is lost in a mire of lethargy which saps any mental strength and positivity right out of it, whilst still apparently providing me with enough drip-fed muse to be able to carry on doing the kind of creative writing which is usually the first thing to desert me when I’m feeling rubbish.

Literally nothing about this day is making any sense to me right now. But I guess that’s just because I’m tired. Can you tell?

…the IV mood swings and energy dips, Ladies and Gentlemen!

Like all good anti-biotic courses (or at least all of my regular IV courses), it doesn’t take long to start really messing with your body in as many ways as possible.

So far we’ve got: random tiredness springing up out of no-where; random waking-upness springing out of nowhere; unquenchable thirst; over-bloating from taking on too much water; dry mouth; raise appetite; sore limbs/achey legs; irrational dip in mood; irrational spike in mood; regular-season, common-or-garden tiredness.  Although so far (with plenty of wood on hand to touch, knock-on, slap my head against etc), I’ve managed to avoid the usual mouth-ulcers and other thrush-like symptoms.

I have delighted, however, in spending 2 days doing pretty much nothing at all, including going back to bed after my a.m. dose and sleeping through practically the whole morning.  The one thing you can guarantee about IVs is that if they make you feel tired, sleeping is the most wonderful counter to it.

I appreciate that might sound a little “well, duh!” obvious, but it the kind of situation I’m in, it’s actually not a given that sleep helps things.  A lot of the time, the tiredness I feel isn’t actually helped out by sleeping an extra 3 or 4 hours, like you might expect.  It’s a kind of false-tiredness which is more a complaint from the body about having too much work to do than anything else.

On IVs, though, it’s a different story.  The tiredness is much more a sign of the things starting to work and almost begging to be given more down-time in which to do their stuff while not having to concentrate on boring things like day-today operations of eating, drinking and sitting upright.  What that happily means for me is that the next few days will be spent fitting in 12-14 hours of sleep in every 24 and actually feeling refreshed for it when I’m not sleeping.

IVs are pretty rubbish, so grabbing hold of the positives is pretty important and it wasn’t really until today that I realised how much the sleep-inducement of IVs can actually help-out, so I’m going to cling to that for the next few hours while I try desperately not to drop off from exhaustion while I wait for my next dose.  That’s the other problem with IVs – if you sleep at the wrong time, you can guarantee that it’ll come back and bite you on the butt and keep you WIDE awake just when you want to be getting the best of your shut-eye.

Anyway, moving away from all the boring medically-stuff, K and I picked up the 3rd season of Lost on DVD this week.  I say picked up, I mean had the nice people at Play.com deliver for us.  We were both hooked on the first two seasons but then missed out on the 3rd when it switched from C4 to Sky One, so we’ve been itching to get our hands on it for ages now.

Finally, we’re back on the wagon – or off it, I suppose, since we have kicked-off a major addiction which is currently managing to over-rule just about everything else in the world apart from sleeping, eating and doing doses of IVs.  In fact, it’s ideal really, because if I’m going to be making the most of these IVs I really do need to be doing as little as possible, so Lost is keeping me in check, glued as I am to the sofa for endless back-to-back episodes.

The trouble is, we’ll be through this season in no time, and then we’ll be lost without Lost.  So I’m thinking we might have to find some new old TV to catch up on in DVD box-set format.  US TV comes in such handy little 40 minute chunks that it fits perfectly into little treatment slots like gaps between nebs and physio and doses of IVs, so it’s ideal for life at the moment.  I think we may be getting through a lot more soon.

But first it’s back to the island to unravel more of the might mystery….  It’s sooooo good!

I’m in the mood to write a really witty, random, stream-of-consciousness blog tonight, but I can’t because a) I’m knackered and b) I’m knackered.  Also, I’m pretty knackered.

(Incidentally, when I say “in the mood” what I really mean is “tired” since all of my best stream-of-consciousness is always written when I’m tired.  But not this tired.)

(Incidentally, it’s just occurred to me that I can remember the very lesson at school at which I learnt how to spell conscious and consciousness.  Odd, isn’t it?  That and “immediately”, although they were different lessons.  In fact, the teacher who taught us “immediately” taught it to us with a rhyme and to this day I can’t type “immediately” without the tune going through my head.  Weird, huh?)

Anyway, knackeredness (yay, new word!) caused largely by Oxford trip today, coupled with start of IVs, which I really should have predicted but thought I could get away with.  My wonderful physio set me straight, though, and made me see the better of kicking off today as opposed to Monday as was my wont.

For all you stat-monkeys out there, today provided a L-F of 0.7/1.2, Sats of 90% and a weigh-in at 54.4kg.  All of which is really not that bad, really.  But with increasing morning headaches, poor sleep and a newly-discovered need to turn Neve up just a trifle over-night, it made sense to kick off some IVs and head-off whatever may be on its way before it decides to settle in for the winter.

First dose this afternoon went fine and dandy, steroids started with them, so expecting huge appetite to kick in sometime in the next few days, too.

Can’t think of anything more to say.  Immediately — it’s such a nice song.