Snow

Saturday morning when I woke up to snow, I excitedly exclaimed "SNOW! IT SNOWED!" like a giddy child. I imagine many of us were like that. There is just something about the first snow. And it was the perfect kind, too, where it was on the grass but not on the roads.

To my delighted surprise, I woke up this morning to find it lightly snowing. Jarrod wasn't awake yet, just me. I turned on the tree, put on some Christmas music, turned on my candle warmer, and sat down.

I noticed the squirrel was at my bird feeder. I grabbed my camera. I snapped away as he ate up my sunflower seeds. And he was such a ham, haha—at one point, as if he noticed me, he turned around at one point and didn't face me anymore. Then later, as if he embraced the whole exercise, he hopped to another rail of the deck and practically posed for a perfect side profile shot. It made me laugh out loud.

You know, I don't particularly enjoy the squirrel eating my birdseed. I mean, it's for the birds, not for the squirrels. My biggest gripe about the squirrels is how quickly they eat the bird food; I have had full feeders when I go to bed, and then drained by morning. But aside from sending Josie out on the deck to terrorize the squirrels every once in a while, there's nothing else I'd really do about it. I could never hurt a squirrel, because I realize they have to eat too. And this morning, with him sitting there in the snow, reinforced that.

After he was finished, the birds started flying in for breakfast. As always, it makes me smile that the birds eat breakfast and supper roundabout when we do. A cardinal couple came along, and I was able to snap those real quick. Cardinals are so beautiful in the snow. They were followed by some juncos and finches. And then the squirrel came back, and I was kind of happy to see him again. Merry Christmas little squirrel, congratulations you won me over, enjoy the bird food.

Sinuses and Sugars

Last Friday was a quite a day.

I started bright and early at Mercy South to repeat my oral glucose tolerance test. I haven't really talked about any of this on here, but a couple months ago I did my annual test and it came back borderline. I wasn't quite diabetic, based on those numbers, but was most definitely in a pre-diabetic gray area.

So we wanted to repeat the test, and I chose to do that last Friday. It took way longer than it should have, and I was there for almost 4 hours. I had just enough time to come home, eat something (since I hadn't had anything yet, save for the glucose beverage), and vest, and turn around and leave to go to my other appointment that day.

I had set up an appointment to go to an ENT. I've been having more sinus symptoms in the past months, and lately I felt I was clearing my throat constantly due to drainage. Sinus symptoms are very, very common in CF and I've been lucky to dodge any major issues until now.

The doctor was up in Saint Peters. My CF doctor, when I asked her about seeing an ENT, mentioned I could see one there or there was another doctor who everyone there had loved, but he left and was "in Wentzville." She was a smidge off on the towns, but close enough. I said "Oh, well that's out by me, I could go see him." So I set up my appointment with him.

Immediately during my visit, it was clear I made the right choice to see him, versus seeing any ol' ENT in town. He has dealt with CF patients before and knows the drill.

Long story short, we did a CT of my sinuses and turns out they're mostly blocked up. There is likely some infection going on, but not in the traditional sense of what people mean when they have a sinus infection. He told me that just like the CF lungs can't naturally clear out mucus, the same with the sinuses. I never thought about it, but that makes perfect sense. Anyways, we're trying to improve things in the meantime with rinses and an antibiotic, but most likely I will need sinus surgery. He said they typically try to tie in a sinus surgery after a hospitalization, since that's when you're feeling the best and, ideally, should be the most cleared out. Again, so glad I went to see him because not everyone would know about all that.

So it's a bummer, but probably a long time coming. I've read comments from other CFers who are 20 and have had like 13 sinus surgeries already. So with that kind of perspective, I've really lucked out. That being said, now that this is an issue for me, it probably won't be my only sinus surgery, and the doctor mentioned that too. He actually commented how lucky and rare it was for me to make it to 30 years old without needing sinus surgery.

So that's the sinus story. Not super fun.

The sugar story... is also not a great story.

I finally got my results Wednesday; my doctor and I had been playing phone tag. And they came back a little worse than last time. Last time, they were 103 and 201. This time, they were 111 and 209. For those who don't know, the first number is your "fasting" number, the second is taken two hours later after drinking the glucose. 100 or under is normal, 100-125 is considered pre-diabetic for the fasting number. On the 2-hour level, over 200 is considered diabetic. 140 or under is normal, that's where you want to be. And between 140 and 200 is pre-diabetic, which is where I've been. As you can see, for my test two months ago I really was right on the cusp, plus I was still trying to feel better and illness or infection can elevate the results. But since this second test was worse, it's safe to say that I am, indeed, diabetic. Not great news.

CF-related diabetes is its own beast. It's not like Type 1, it's not like Type 2, it's weird. I can't change what I eat because then I would lose weight, and since I already struggle with that, I need to keep eating just like I am. Cutting carbs is absolutely not advised. That being said, there may be a way to control it with diet in pairing carbs with proteins and fats, because those can counteract blood sugar spikes. So bring on the steak and bacon, haha.

Just like I sought out a specific ENT because of his experience with CF, I will be seeing an endocrinologist in Columbia because he has experience with CFRD.

So yeah... a lot of information for me to process. I'm really trying not to get too ahead of myself with the diabetes stuff, because I have no idea what the doctor will tell me. I don't know if I'll need insulin; I have to wait and see what he recommends. But it's hard. This is just more shit I have to worry about and fit into my day, which already feels jam packed. In trying to convince myself this isn't as bad as it seems, I'm trying to tell myself that we caught this early. Yes, I am past the diabetic threshold... but just barely. It's not like my sugars came back at 250 or something. Furthermore, I knew that the older I got, the higher my chances were that this would come up. 50% of adults with CF have CFRD. In addition to that, about 3-4 years ago we thought I had CFRD but turned out I didn't just yet, but it's not surprising things continued to trend this way.

Josie's checkup

As some of you may have already seen on Facebook, Josie had some issues yesterday.

I took her for her annual checkup and vaccines. I also talked with the doctor about her itchy ears, and he gave her a gel medicine in her ears to take care of any infection present. He said I could wipe off any excess that worked it's way out of her ears.

Once we were home her ears looked kinda gross, to be honest. She had shook her head enough, I guess, that a lot of the gel was coming out. I wiped them down, then went in my vest room to check something on my iPad. She followed me in there and proceeded to roll around on the floor, rubbing her head and ears on the carpet. I half expected her to do this, because any time we put medicine or anything in her ears, she hates it, and tries to rub her ears on the carpet. I tried to stop her. She got smart and went under the bed where I couldn't reach her, haha. But I could tell she was still bothered by it, because she was rolling around under the bed and licking the carpet compulsively. But it wasn't just her ears, it looked like she was just trying to rub the side of her face, in general, on the carpet.

I coaxed her out and noticed her ears were RED, I mean really, really red. They were also really hot. As I started to look her over more, and still trying to wipe off the goo and prevent her from rolling around and getting away from me, I saw the area around her eyes was puffy and turning red. A couple of her paws were swelling up and pink too. Okay, something is not right here, this seems like an allergic reaction.

I called the vet, and they said to bring her back. I sat and waited while they checked her out. After some time, one of the vet tech's came out saying that she was definitely reacting to something, but they'd never seen a reaction like that to the ear gel. They had to call the doctor, because he was out on a farm call. He was surprised by the news, and wanted to look her over once he was back. That wouldn't be for at least another 20 minutes, so they said I could leave her there and come back to pick her up. They were giving her some Benedryl by injection, wiping out all of the ear gel, and they were putting cold packs on her ears because they were on fire.

I ran some errands, and by then it was silly to come home for ten minutes, so I went back a little early. The doctor talked with me, and said he thought she was having a reaction to one of the vaccines. I assumed it was the ear gel, since that was the only part of her visit yesterday that was different, but he explained for her to have such a systemic reaction, involving her entire body, instead of just locally in the ears, it was likely the vaccine. I mentioned she's never reacted like this before, just been a tad lethargic the following day. After hearing that, he was even more inclined to believe it was the vaccine. Even though I think lethargy after, like, a rabies vaccine is pretty common, I guess it's still kind of a reaction in it's own way. (All that being said, a tiny part of me still wonders if it was the gel because the entire episode seemed to start with her ears. Who knows.)

He said she was running a pretty good fever, her face was still swollen, and her heart rate was up, so he was going to give her something like "doggie Tylenol" to help with that. He wanted us to watch her closely last night, make sure there were no breathing problems and that her fever came down.

When they brought her out to me, she was a bit mellow. I'm sure that was partly the Benedryl; I know how I feel on Benedryl, and getting an injection is even stronger than taking the pill. But her face was still puffy around her nose and mouth. That part had not yet happen when I dropped her off, so that must have presented itself after I handed her off. Poor Josie.

Since posting about this on social media, I've had 4 other dog owners share similar stories of their dogs having an out-of-the-blue reaction to their annual vaccines. In some cases, they said it continued, and in others they said it was only the one year and every time since then has been fine. I'll see what they say next year as to what they want to do for her.

Muzzle still a little puffy and swollen

Unfortunately it's impossible to determine which vaccine caused the issue. She got her usual three yesterday. Maybe we'll try them one at a time next year, at least that would be my suggestion.

She's doing better this morning. I think her fever went away around 8:00 last night. I never took her temp, but I could easily feel she was hotter than normal for a while. I encouraged her to drink water and rest a lot, because she could barely keep her head up and her eyes open anyways. This morning she was a bit groggy still, but I think in the past hour she's started to act more normal. She's laying in the sunshine right now :).

We're very thankful this was a one day thing and she's been doing better. Here's hoping it doesn't happen again or, if it does, we can pinpoint the cause.

Yay tree!

The old tree.

We finally bought a new Christmas tree this year. Our previous tree was a hand-me-down from my parents. It served us well, but was a very big and FULL tree; larger than we would like. But, beggars can't be choosers, so we used it ever since we got married. But the thing weighed about 80 pounds. With Jarrod's back being more sensitive to strain ever since his car accident, it's not good for him to carry this thing upstairs.

He brought it up, set it up and plugged it in. All that to find out about 1/3 of the lights were out. And it wasn't all in one spot, like one strand, it was all over the tree. That was it; we're getting a new tree.

The new tree!

We had very specific criteria for what we wanted, and it turned out finding a tree was harder than I thought. On Cyber Monday I bought the tree. 

We got it on Wednesday! Fast shipping. I started fluffing it up, something that I actually enjoy for some weird reason. I've always been the tree fluffer, even when I was younger. 

Time to decorate! I had been using the same ribbon on my tree for 3 years, was it time for a new look? Not to mention, the ribbon I had would not "fit" right on the new tree, since it was much narrower. I decided to combine some old gold mesh I weaved in between the ribbon, bought some new silver ribbon, and added some poinsettias to the look (and thus had the "Silver and Gold" song from Rudolph stuck in my head for days.) I had to make a new bow for the top and added the flower to tie it all together.

I LOVE the way it turned out! I am so glad I chose to go with a new look for the new tree. I still have all my s'more ornaments on there! Never gonna give those up because they're so darn adorable. They still make them too, which makes me happy. Also, previously we always set up the tree in the front room because it was too wide for our living room. By default we did the same with the new tree, until Sunday when I pointed out we could swap the recliner and the tree and be able to enjoy the tree in the living room. I'm so glad we did!

S'mores everywhere!

Past the saga

I had a checkup yesterday. And it went well!

My PFT was practically back to baseline, it's numerically just a smidge lower than it was after I got out of the hospital back in September.

Augh, we are so glad and thankful. I know many were praying hard, and I thank you for that.

The PFT is not the entire picture, mind you. I have had times where I feel fine and my PFT is bad and times where I feel awful but my PFT is decent. The good news is I am feeling better, along with having a better lung test yesterday. But, I still want to keep pushing. And I'll always be like that, hoping for better, even if it might not actually happen.

The bad news, in a way, is we don't really have a good explanation for all this. I mean, it appears the probable key factor that started to turn all this around was switching up my steroid inhaler, as I wrote about on here. That did help, but it still took a couple more weeks for me to really start to feel it. I cautiously told Jarrod last week that I had two days where I didn't notice feeling short of breath as much. I took that as a good sign, but I didn't want to get too ahead of myself. After all, when this entire 'saga' started, it was a huge shock. Sometimes I wonder if I am so hyper-tuned-in to myself and how I feel daily that I miss the bigger picture. Granted, this is why I keep my health journal, but still.

These past two months have been tough. At times, it's tough to keep hoping for better results. At times, it's hard not to feel trapped and helpless about the situation. At times, it's downright frustrating. I finally feel like we can put this behind us, in a way, and move on. Back to normal.

Jarrod made a great dinner last night, my mom brought me flowers, and I had a chocolate milk stout, one of my favorite beers! It was a good day.

Etsy

For years, I've thought about opening an Etsy shop. I've been through a slew of ideas for it—some of them good, some of them silly—but I never actually did anything about it.

Back in September, I decided to finally stop putting it off. My plan was to sell my crochet stuff and some printables (which are quotes and such that I design and people can print at home; they're an easy thing that takes little effort on my part.) I set a goal of having it open by the end of October, so I would be ready for the holiday rush.

Well, that deadline came and went.

On the first Saturday of deer season, 11/11, I worked on it almost all day. It was tiring. I had to redo so many things and by about 4pm I was ready to quit, call the whole thing off. It's hard to explain, but the more I did, the more little things I found I needed to do or decide on.

For example: shipping. You have to list the shipping size and weight of your item. Okay, I guess I need to go to the post office and figure that out. Another example: everyone who sells these printables things has an image of them displayed in a frame to show an example of how it could look. I went all over the house taking photos of empty frames so I could do that too. But as I looked at all of the photos in other Etsy shops, mine looked awful in comparison. Their's were clearly some sort of stock photo, which I then briefly looked into, but I didn't want to pay for a photo for this Etsy shop that I may or may not even make any money on.

I decided I had one good photo of my own, so I used it over and over. I got some listings created, but they were all so random, there was no theme or rhyme or reason to them. I really started losing confidence in the whole thing.

My store is going to be called Laughing Dog Co., and in that vein, I started thinking I should probably sell mostly dog-related items. I love dogs—duh!—and instead of offering random crochet items, how about focus on dog sweaters. I also have ideas for dog-related printables.

Yesterday I was really having a hard time deciding what to do about the whole thing, though. I still had a desire to open my shop for the holiday shopping season, but that felt completely unattainable at this point. I would love to press GO and open my shop... the problem is, I don't have hardly any items to sell right now and I am worried that would not give a good first impression. I have been crocheting as much as possible without driving myself mad, but I only have two dog sweaters.

I haven't even had a chance to work on the printables I mentioned, so basically I'd be opening a shop with a few random quotes to print and two dog sweaters? That doesn't sound like something I'd even want to show off to people. I set high standards for myself (typical of only children) and while I've gotten better about that, I would not be okay with having a barely-stocked Etsy shop as a representation of what I'm capable of.

My crocheting is a hobby and for now I intend to keep it that way. I don't want to worry about taking orders, which would then make this more like a business and no longer a fun hobby. That was not my intent going into this. That being said, I would like to sell some things. I don't want to keep making things, list the items (which cost 20¢ per listing) and never sell anything. That's where my hesitation and my desire to have my ducks all in a row before opening comes into play. There are tons and tons of Etsy shops out there who have tried and failed for myriad reasons. The people who are most successful with this are the ones who:

1. have a plan and a bit of a niche/theme for their shop;
2. are good at SEO on Etsy;
3. have social media components to their shops (I went ahead and claimed social media URLs in case I'd ever want to use them); and
4. make their shop look legit with good branding and good photos of their items. 

After all this, I finally feel like I have a good plan and a good vision; it's taken a bit longer than I'd hoped, but I feel a lot better about everything going forward. I'll still sell doilies or snowflakes too, even though they don't really fit a dog theme, but whatever. I am going to keep working on it, and I WILL open my shop, hopefully by the end of the year. And that excites me! I have put a lot of time in to my shop, but for now it's still not enough and I need to keep working. Once it's ready, I'll let you all know! 

The injured cardinal

I shared this on Facebook, but yesterday I saw a cardinal sitting just a foot from the house on the deck. He wasn't moving, so I grabbed my Nikon and started taking photos.

I think he flew into the glass door, because there were some feathers stuck on the glass. They were still there this morning, even; must have been a hard hit.

He just sat there, sort of dozing off at times, for over 10 minutes while I took photos of him. I think he was kind of out of it and needed the time to recoup before flying off. I inched closer and closer to the glass door and he never moved a muscle. He could not have cared less that I was there.

I started to get a little worried I might have a dead bird on my hands again. On Wednesday, I found a dead junco in the front yard. No idea what happened to it, it was still very intact and clean. I was worried—until I noticed the feathers on the door—the cardinal might be sick or dying too. I think he hit on the right side of his head, too, because a few feathers around his eyes were smashed and ruffled.

Josie came over at one point to investigate, too. I shared the photo of her staring at him on her Instagram account and realized something that should have been obvious: not everyone knows what a cardinal is.

I know I've mentioned her Instagram account before, and since we/she has friends all over the world, I had multiple comments saying they'd never seen a bird like that.

Cardinals are so common here, I never really gave much thought that cardinals weren't like a 'northern hemisphere' kind of bird or something, I figured you might find them in parts of Europe too. But turns out they only live in parts of the US and Mexico. 

They really are beautiful birds, when the sunlight shines on those red feathers it is such a beautiful color. And when I think about it, our area is home to a lot of colorful, beautiful birds. How lucky we are!

Small update

I checked in with my doctor on Monday.

I let her know basically what I had written on here: I wasn't worse, but wasn't sure how much better I was either and I had encouraging signs with my wheezing stopping and having better exercise tolerance.

The game plan is to keep up what I'm doing; keep pushing myself—within reason, obviously—on the treadmill, and I will see them at the end of the month. We'll repeat the usual PFT and see where that is.

So please keep praying. I know I'm not giving up and you shouldn't either! My hope is to get back to baseline, where I was. If I can, I feel like things can get back to normal, we don't have to worry about transplant talks just yet, and things will calm down for now.

Friday Fast 5

Today's is EXTRA random and semi-pointless, but nevertheless, here's what's been plunking around in my brain:

1. This fall weather has been great! Although it was a bit on the cold side last weekend.
2. Monday, I noticed a bunch of juncos—aka snow birds—hopping around on the deck! It's a good sign when the juncos have arrived from Canada. In other bird news, the squirrels continue to be a nuisance no matter how many times I send Josie out on the deck to scare them off. Those buggers just never learn... Anyways, it made me laugh the other day because there was a line of birds on the deck waiting for the squirrel to be done pigging out. They kinda hop around and turn their heads, looking at the squirrel like "Hey, you done yet? This is OUR food ya know!"
3. There is a new majong club at the library here. For half a second I thought that'd be fun—I play majong on my iPad, learning how to play in real life could be cool. Then I looked at our Missourian photo gallery from their first meeting, and it was literally a bunch of people sitting around, instructions out, trying to figure out how the hell you play majong. Maybe they figured it out eventually, but it didn't look encouraging.
4. I just did a small load of Josie laundry. I washed all of her sweaters in preparation for the cooler season. They kinda smelled, all piled up together. I probably should have washed all of them at the end of the season earlier in the year, but oh well.
5. We are getting a new paper shredder, and I could not be more excited. We had a tiny one that bit the dust a few weeks ago. It just stopped, mid-shred. I couldn't get it to back up or advance, nothing, so there is a mostly-eaten Walgreens paper just stuck in the thing. It was never a great shredder anyways and was so annoying because it constantly quit, saying the bin was full when it wasn't. I hated that thing. I have probably 3 boxes worth of stuff that have piled up over the years and I am so ready to get rid of it!

Been in a rough patch

I haven't talked about this on here yet, but I haven't been doing so great.

It started over a month ago, I guess. I started to have more shortness of breath and I was getting breathless just doing normal tasks around the house.  I kind of did a 'wait and see' with it, because a few days after it started I had my hospital follow-up appointment anyways.

At my appointment, my PFT was not good. My lung functions are right back to where they were before the hospital, which is not encouraging. I called Jarrod over lunch that day, crying, because it's just so frustrating. You do everything you're supposed to do, but sometimes it's just not enough. It's just so hard...

We tried a short stint of steroids, and those seemed to help, but not for the long term. I had another follow-up last week and my PFTs were the same. So any progress I may have had while I was on the steroids was short-lived.

We decided to do another stint of prednisone and switch the steroid inhaler I'm on to see if that could help. After a week or so on the new one, I think I'm a little better, but I'm not sure if it's helping enough. I was starting to wheeze quite often, which is not normal for me, and that has pretty much ceased. So that's good. But yesterday was a bit of a weird day; it started out rough, and I wasn't breathing too well, then I cleared out some gunk and felt better, and was able to manage 3.0 mph on the treadmill last night! I don't even know the last time I was able to do that, comfortably. So that's encouraging, maybe I really am starting to make some headway.

The plan is for me to call and check in with my doctors next Monday. I hope I can continue to improve my exercise tolerance through the weekend and that, in turn, will help improve everything else.

You know, this whole "rough patch" has been difficult on me and Jarrod. I feel like our lives are sort of on hold. We're trying things to see if I can improve, and if I can then that's great and we can get back to normal, and if I can't... well... that's not great news. My lung function is around 25%, which is extremely low. It may not sound like a lot, but trust me there is a huge difference in how I felt at 30% versus 25%. If it stays that way, that also means we need to start talking about transplant again because I'm just that much closer to needing one. I mostly keep those thoughts at bay and am not worrying about them until I need to, but it's a truth that needs to be aired. If we can't turn this train around and this is just where I'm at now, it will have a broad effect on many aspects of our lives.

But for now, I'm hopeful. We haven't exhausted every option available. If we have to, I might need another hospital stay. It would suck to have to go in again so soon, but it's happened before. Most recently, when I was out of the hospital, I was nearly back to baseline. So I have a hard time believing that in 4 weeks after, something happened that was so drastic to cause me to lose 5 percentage points and make it so I'll never gain that back. Maybe my steroid inhaler, which I've been on for 4+ years now, stopped having much effect on me anymore. Maybe just switching that up is all it will take, who knows.