Heading In

I know, it's been a long time. I just haven't really been in the mood to write lately.

But, I figured that as always this is the easiest way to let everyone know... I will be heading in to the hospital for a regular tune up this week.

I've been coughing more and more in the past few weeks, and I've hardly gotten a full night's sleep in well over a month, at least without the help of some super strong cough syrup. Maybe one night a week I'm able to sleep the whole night through, but it hasn't been much.

We have a game plan already figured out, which is the way I prefer to do these things if at all possible. I do a PFT ahead of time and also provide a sputum culture so we can figure out before I get there what we're up against. Otherwise, it's potentially wasted time because my sensitivities to drugs and what kind of bacteria I'm culturing change regularly.

This time we are dealing with only ONE strain of bacteria that is fairly resistant, but not entirely, and my only options are all stuff I'm allergic to. Not the best news, but definitely not all bad since there is only ONE enemy this time to fight. So I will be admitted straight to the ICU to get the desensitization process going first thing, instead of, again, wasting time and spending one day on the floor doing nothing (but still paying for it, of course) and then going to the ICU on day 2. No thanks, I'll just get the ball rolling asap please.

As an aside, in case anyone is lost, a little CF301: Sputum Cultures here to explain everything I'm talking about. Every time I come in the hospital or a clinic appointment, I do a "sputum culture" which is where you cough up something and send it off to the lab. It takes 5 days to complete, because the ones they do for us CFers are very detailed. Once at the lab, they determine A. what bacteria are growing and B. the drug sensitivities of said bacteria/bugs. The two biggest players in the CF world are staph (particularly MRSA) and Pseudomonas. There are others bugs that are bigger concerns, but those two are the most common. There can be different strains of the same bacteria. Each one is different, each one can have different sensitivities. When I say "sensitivities" it means if the germ is "sensitive" or "resistant" to a specific medication. As in, a medication will work with something that is sensitive, but it won't if the strain is resistant. This is why sometimes, if you catch bronchitis and the antibiotic the doctor gives you doesn't work, it's because the bacteria you have is not 'sensitive' to the med and it needs to be switched. Except, for the average person, they're probably not going to run a sputum culture just to figure it out because most people don't have very resistant super special bacteria. I'm just special like that.

Randomly, I was going thru old emails today and found a culture from this exact same time last year with what appears to be the exact same strain. It had the same sensitivities and everything, so maybe this one has settled in for the long haul. However, at this time last year, there were 2 other strains of bacteria too, so that's why I am VERY happy to see only one came back this time. I guess we won the war against the other two—for now—so they have been banished from the land that is my airways.

I'm expecting this stay to be a bit different because I won't be on my usual floor. It is currently under renovations and apparently even when they do reopen it, they are short on nurses and aren't sure what they're going to do. So I have no idea if I will have the same nurses as before or not. I'm guessing not, which will be a shame. I always enjoy seeing some of my nurses. You develop a kind of friendship after a while, seeing them as often as I do.

But I'm feeling good and hopeful about this stay. I'm not as sick as sometimes where I'm in such dire need of meds, but I'm still definitely sick enough to constitute what we're doing. So I'm hoping that bouncing back won't be as difficult.

A Wonderful Vacation

Jarrod and I returned Sunday afternoon from a wonderful, nearly perfect anniversary vacation to Branson. We are celebrating five years of marriage!

We started our vacation Thursday morning eating breakfast at Cowan's. Jarrod had never been there before, so it was high time we went, haha! It had been years since I had gone there too.

A really beautiful sunrise Friday morning from our window.

Friday we rented a boat and went out on Table Rock Lake for four hours. The weather forecast was a little iffy, with a 40% chance of pop up rain/storms, but it turned out great. It wasn't too windy, it didn't rain or storm. It was pretty hot and humid, so the water felt good.

Saturday, on our actual anniversary, we drove towards the dam to a viewing area you could pull off onto. There was a road we found, and we weren't entirely sure where it would end up, but it came out down near Tanycomo, where trout fisherman could wade in. This fisherman was nearby and he became the perfect subject for taking photos:

Oh, and: goose butts. Hahahahaha!

We were in Table Rock State Park, even though we were next to Lake Tanycomo (which, Jarrod informed me: Tanycomo is named for being in Tany County, like Tany Co. Mo.? Someone must have been bored when they named that lake.) There was an entrance point to the trail system and we decided to do one of the loops, and I crossed one thing off my bucket list: go hiking! Yay! I brought my camera with me, and was having fun taking pictures along the way. But the bigger deal here is that I hiked! I kept a good pace and of course I was breathing hard at times, but I'm so happy I was able to do it! It had some steep inclines and uneven rocky terrain, but Jarrod said that it was very well-marked and a pretty good trail. But next time, we'll bring bug spray and do a Map My Route at the beginning for fun. Live and learn, haha.

Light in the forest.

We had dinner at the White River Fish House, which is actually Bass Pro's restaurant down on the Branson Landing. It was really good! I would recommend it. Afterwards we came back to our hotel bar to enjoy a cocktail and to our surprise, around 9:00pm a piano player arrived to play on the baby grand.

He was SO enjoyable! It was absolutely delightful listening to him. His improvisation was incredible. He asked for requests and would play from memory, or make it up, or a little of both. He never looked at a piece of music the entire time, it was all in his head. One woman asked for "Dream A Little Dream of Me" and he got up to hum a few notes with her to establish he remembered the song, sat back down and said "Ok, I got it. I'll throw in a nice bridge in the middle." He came over and asked me for a request at one point, and asked if I sang. I said "Ehh... sometimes." He said I looked like a singer or a dancer, he thought maybe I was "in the biz" there because I "just had that smile, that confidence about you." Aw... :) I requested "Singin' In the Rain," and he made that one up as he went but it was spot on. He played ragtime, musicals, he played pop songs in the style of a jazz tune, he played a jazz tune in the style of a waltz. It was wonderful.

Turns out he is there most Friday or Saturday evenings, and when I looked him up online, found in his bio that he has worked with numerous television shows/specials as a composer, conductor, or musician; Dick van Dyke, the Tonight Show, Matlock, Donnie and Marie Osmond, Sammy Davis, Roy Clark, Jack Benny, the Academy Awards, plus tons more and he moved to Branson back in the 90s to play and conduct for Andy Williams at his show there. Now he plays at the Chateau on the Lake. If you are ever in Branson on a Friday or Saturday evening and you want to hear a talented jazz pianist, you have to drive over to Chateau to listen to this guy.

Sunday we ate breakfast and played one last round of mini-golf before heading home; mini golf is one of my favorite things to do in Branson since there's an abundance of courses. The breakfast spot was Billy Gail's, which came highly recommend by my mom's friend, Gwen. They offer free coffee while you wait, and it was possibly the best pancake I've had in my life. Yes, pancake, singular, because the pancakes are colossal. They're larger than the plate and bring up visions of Uncle Buck trying to flip a pancake with a snow shovel.

Me and my pancake. Seriously, how do they flip this thing over?

All in all our trip was so wonderful: great weather, great time, things went well, hardly any hiccups, and pretty much all of the places we ate at were good or awesome.

If you'd have told me five years ago that on our 5th wedding anniversary I would be hiking through the Ozarks, I don't think I'd have believed you. Actually, I know I wouldn't have because back then I wouldn't have felt it would be possible for me to do it. These past five years married to Jarrod have been so good, and I look forward to many more.

Sunset from the lookout point on Saturday evening.

Oh What A Beautiful Morning

I wouldn't describe myself as a morning person, but maybe I'm a semi-morning person. I have a hard time getting out of bed, as of late I'm lucky if I'm out of bed by the time Jarrod leaves for work at 6:45am. But once I am up, I am UP and ready to get things going.

This morning, I woke up at 4:00am coughing. I got up, got some albuterol, sat up for a bit, went back to bed, couldn't fall asleep, and got up at 5:15. I already feel like I've done so much!

I love sunrises, and I've enjoyed seeing the sunrise this morning. I've also been delighted to watch the birds up and about. The birds chirp and tweet a lot during the wee morning hours, if you've never noticed, and they have been busy busy gathering bugs for breakfast. I should have had my camera out because a robin, a bluejay, a cardinal pair, and some sort of crow all stopped by on the deck to perch.

In addition to staring out the windows a lot, I did my treatment, finished a Netflix movie, ate pancakes for breakfast, got Jarrod's lunch together, put a load of laundry in, showered, and now I'm writing about it all. And it's STILL not even 8:00am!

I love feeling so productive, but man... when the alarm clock is going off it is so hard to get out of bed.

Right or left ?

Are you right-handed? Or left-handed?


I'm right-handed in writing, but I'm a bit of a mix-up when it comes to dominant sides. I've been recently reminded of this with the camera I got for an early birthday present.

I decided to try putting my right eye on the viewfinder and realized that cameras are built for right-eye dominant people, just as most things are made for right-handers. I'm left-eye dominant so instead, my oily nose smushes up against the back of the camera and always leaves a smudge on it.

But my confusion doesn't stop there. I also play sports semi-left-handed, haha. I golf as a lefty, bat as a lefty, play tennis as a lefty, but I shoot pool as a righty, throw a ball with my right hand, and if I hunted I would shoot with my right hand (and with a dominant left eye that would make things kinda complicated.)

I was wondering if handedness is genetic, since my mom is left-handed and my dad is right-handed. Scientists suspect that it is genetic, but not in the traditional sense that explains why I have CF (I do), if you have red hair (I don't), or which of your toes is longest (my second one.) All of those follow the standard dominant/recessive patterns. Genetics have always fascinated me and I would love to look at a whole bunch of data on traits people have and inherited, just for fun.

So I have no answers as to my odd combination of the two, but I have yet to hear of many other people who have things both ways like I do. I know they are out there, but again, I'd love to see some data on just how many of us there are. So I ask you, are you kind of a mix when it comes to right- or left-handedness like me?


 
As a side tangent, if you're unsure which is your dominant eye, there's a little trick you can do to find out. I didn't figure this out "officially" until a few months ago, though I've always closed my right eye in times where you need just one eye open; I just didn't give it any thought.

Friday Fast 5

1. Wow! It's been a month since I wrote anything on my blog.
2. I've decided to try and cook one new recipe each month, and on Tuesday my new dish for dinner was Mongolian Beef. And it turned out awesome! I was so happy. I made the sauce, cooked the beef, got the rice and noodles ready and it all tasted so good. Jarrod said it tasted better than the restaurant versions he's had, so woo hoo! If anyone wants the recipe, email me. 
3. A bit of advice when making Asian food at home: Jarrod and I have found that you must make your own sauce. It's more ingredients and a little more time, but it makes your kitchen smell oh-so-good and tastes 100 times better than sauce you can buy in a jar. I have another copy-cat recipe for PF Chang's Spicy Chicken where you make the sauce, and it also tastes great. We've tried going the easy route and buying the Panda Express orange chicken sauce and another General Tso's sauce with lackluster results. It doesn't end up tasting like takeout, and it doesn't taste all that great either. So, it's all in the sauce!
4. Last week was a stormy week. Thankfully, we were spared some of the worst. But Josie was stressed out a bit more with the bad weather. I went downstairs with her a couple times, which seems to be the best way to handle her storm anxiety so far. We sit in the back treadmill room where the wind, rain, and thunder cannot be heard much. More than anything, I'm trying to establish a consistent place for her to go, and hopefully this bit of training is catching on... slowly. I watch the radar on my phone and once the coast is clear we come back upstairs. 
5. This year midway through Lent, I decided to give up Facebook on my phone. Once Lent was over, I talked about how I might keep it up most of the time in another blog post. Lent ended almost two months ago, and I am still keeping up with it! I am very, very happy with my decision. I log out of my Facebook app every time I am done using it, and for me that has been the key to keep me off of it. Being met with the login screen each time I open the app is like a stop sign for me to mentally ask myself Do I REALLY need to check Facebook right now? Why am I doing this? and sometimes I log in and see what's up, and sometimes I just close the app and leave it alone. On the rare occasion I don't log out when I'm done, it's like my brain knows that the cookie jar is wide open so it just wants to keep going back for more and more treats (excuse my metaphor, but I thought it worked haha) and sure enough, I find myself coming back to Facebook 3-4 times in an evening, just like old times, scrolling through hoping for something new. If you're wanting to reduce your social media time, this plan of attack would be my suggestion. It still allows you to get on there, but that tiny little pause is enough to break the habit of just opening the app over and over without thought.

OMG You Guys!

I just found out today that we here in our little city will be in the pathway of a TOTAL Solar Eclipse next year, the one happening on August 21, 2017.

What an awesome, once in a lifetime event! The last total solar eclipse to cross the continental United States from coast to coast like this one happened in 1918... so yeah, kind of a big deal.

If you weren't aware, I'm a bit of a space junkie. I have always loved space, it was one of my three topics I was really interested in as a kid (the other two being Native Americans and the Titanic.) My favorite planet is Jupiter, and I felt sad the day they announced Pluto got demoted from being a planet.

Pathway of the entire eclipse.

Now that I'm older, I still love space and I am constantly in awe with the news and discoveries coming from the universe, like this year when scientists announced they had proven the existence of gravitational waves, which is a theory by Einstein. They constructed this massive detector with lasers and math beyond my comprehension to measure the waves, which are ripples in space time, hoping they might find one, and just for like a nano-nano-nano-second of time they had a blip on the charts which thus proved that indeed a wave had passed over the earth from a black hole that formed 1.29 billion years ago. Like, does that not just totally blow your mind? Mind officially blown.

OK, back to eclipse stuff. I keep saying total solar eclipse because that "total" part is a big deal. Partial solar eclipses are more common, where the moon blocks out part of the sun's light, making the sun look like a glowing cookie with a bite out of it. Total eclipses are rare, and even less common during daylight when it will be noticeable, like the one coming next year. This is the kind where the entire sun will be blocked, you will only see a ring of light around the moon, and the land will be in total darkness during the middle of the day. How. friggin'. cool.

In our particular spot (this is important) the sun will be completely covered for 2 minutes and 28 seconds, quite a long time. The longest duration is 2 minutes 40 seconds, and that will happen near Makanda, Illinois. So we've got a nice long chunk of time to observe the eclipse. And if my calculations are correct, it will happen from 1:15-1:18 p.m.

You can see the path of the eclipse in the map below. The red line is the central path, the blue lines are the limits of where you'll be able to see it. As you can see, we are very near the central path; St. Clair and Leslie are nearly dead on, St. Louis proper is just out of reach.

So that's my excitement for the day. I'm marking my calendar. Maybe I'll listen to some Pink Floyd. Space nerds from all over the world will travel to the US to see this. We just need the weather to cooperate. How disappointing would it be if it was raining that day?!

A cold is not just

I realized I never blogged my results. Sorry about that!

So after all those days of coughing, and the tests, it all came back to say I had a cold and a pulmonary exacerbation, which is the typical pulmonary thing I have when I go in the hospital. 

But boy, this sure was a doozy of a cold. And it didn't even feel like a cold! I didn't even have nasal symptoms until Monday. And even stranger, kind of, is no one has gotten sick from me. I'm relieved, obviously, but also because I always ask that everyone let me know when they're sick, and I feel bad I couldn't return the favor. In my defense, though, again, it just didn't feel like a cold or anything that was contagious, it felt like CF stuff. I almost wonder if I got a cold mid way through my pulmonary issues. Who knows. 

I'm doing better, but if I exhaled sharply for you, you'd hear how awful my airways sound; similar to a 70-year-old smoker kind of hacking. So I still have a long climb back up. And based on everything I've been hearing about cold season, even NORMAL people are getting colds that last 2-3 weeks. So this might take a while. I have no idea why the cold virus going around here has become so strong. 

We've said it before but this is proof in the pudding that a cold just isn't a cold for someone with CF, it can be a dire, possibly-send-you-to-the-hospital situation. Cover your coughs, folks! Haha

Not doing the best...

Well, I almost made it through cold and flu season scotch free, but it just didn't happen.

Last Thursday evening, I started coughing after I walked on the treadmill. It continued basically all night, while trying to watch a movie with a friend. I slept in the recliner, because laying down makes me cough in times like these, and semi-sitting up is the only possible way to get sleep.

Friday was much of the same: I coughed through work, I was extremely short of breath, I tried to take a nap but maybe only got 30 minutes. My parents wanted to take Jarrod out to dinner for his birthday, and I waited until the last minute to decide if I felt we should reschedule. We ended up going, and I made it through, but was still coughing consistently.

I didn't feel sick, it didn't feel like a cold or something. It felt kind of like a flare-up, some sort of pulmonary attack, possibly from my bugs I have down in my lungs all the time.

Saturday, still coughing. Again, I tried to rest all day because we had an event to go to that evening with some friends, and I really wanted to go. I still didn't feel like I caught something, this felt like it was all CF-related me issues and therefore I wouldn't be contagious. I decided to go to the event, but would leave if it got to be too much. I ended up leaving a bit early towards the end.

Sunday... the cough itself was worse. It was deeper, worse sounding. I kept up on my breathing treatments, and did my Aerobika for 4 hours hoping it'd help and then I would be done coughing. But it still didn't happen. I mean, it's still a good thing I cleared stuff out, but it didn't abate my cough in the least. I had a constant wheeze when I exhaled too, that varied in sound from a falling anvil in the Looney Tunes to a Tarzan cry.

I figured I'd reach out with my doctors on Monday, but then I got a low-grade fever, always a sign your body is fighting off something. I knew I needed to call my doctor, but I was so dreading it because I was afraid they were going to have me come straight into the hospital. You know how that goes, you want to ignore a problem and hope it goes away, but deep down you know that doesn't work and you need to do something about it, something you really don't want to do? I couldn't just ignore the fever, so I called my doctor, and she called in some antibiotics for me so I could jump start on those, and would have me come in for a chest x-ray and other tests.

Sunday evening was kind of my breaking point. After coughing for 4 days straight, I was exhausted. I didn't even have the energy to cry about it. I imagine it's a similar exhaustion parents of newborns feel; just when you think you're really exhausted and couldn't possibly be more exhausted than you are right now, you wake back up to a crying baby—in my case, my cough—and your exhaustion reaches new levels. I could barely function, but I couldn't quit coughing long enough to actually sleep or rest. I wanted to lay down, I wanted to give my back a break, but I couldn't because like I said, laying down—even in bed with 4 pillows—made me cough. I was so exhausted I couldn't even really cough anymore. I had a Derek Zoolander I've-got-the-black-lung-pop kind of cough because I just couldn't muster the strength.

Today, Jarrod took me to Columbia for my tests. I didn't meet with the doctor, but we'll get the results tomorrow morning and determine where to go from there. I would have done all of it out here, but out here they can't do the sputum culture, the most important piece of the puzzle in the event this gets worse and I need to go in the hospital. I'm glad to report that I'm not coughing as much, but now I'm on damage control. I've got a lot of gunk to clear out. I was able to treadmill for 15 minutes, so that's a good start.

But I ask for your prayers. Gosh this has been a rough one. I've had times like these before, and I always get through it, but I don't think I've ever had a cough consistently last this many days. I could be wrong.

Jarrod has been wonderful through all of this. He took care of everything over the weekend, with cleaning and cooking and more. Even when I attempted to help, he would tell me to go sit back down and focus on resting.

Josie has been wonderful too. She has been hopping up on the chair to lay with me, cuddling with me often, and just generally checking on me if I'm gone from the room for a bit. She even just sat right next to my legs yesterday while Jarrod tried to comfort me with a hug (except, not really a hug, because we couldn't hug, because on Saturday I thought it'd be a GREAT idea for him to smoke a chicken, but really I could not have picked a more AWFUL time for him to smoke meat since smoke bothers me, and therefore I couldn't even be around him until he changed clothes and showered. Brilliant plan on my part... yeesh.)

So again, I'd appreciate it if you kept me in your thoughts and prayers. I'll let you all know how the tests come back tomorrow.

Friday Fast 3

I'm only doing three today, since my three that I have are long.

Nummer Eins
Our dog can be strange sometimes. Almost daily, Josie will wander off. I'll notice she's gone after about 10 minutes or so, and decide to go find her to make sure she's not doing something she shouldn't. I have lately been finding her in our bedroom or bathroom, but it's so odd it makes me laugh. Sometimes she's standing in our bathroom, staring at the floor, sometimes she's just laying near the foot of our bed. One time I found her half standing in our shower, half not, staring at the floor like like she was confused. Another day I found her just laying down in our closet. Not, like, curled up in a ball, but paws forward, head up, like it's the most normal thing in the world to want to chill out in the closet. It's so random and goofy. Maybe she's playing hide and seek with me, because she probably knows that I will eventually always come looking for her. I'll see where she decides to hide out next week...

Nummer Zwei
This week Apple re-introduced a smaller iPhone the same size as the one I have from 2 years ago. I'm glad, because I'm not a fan of the bigger phone trends. Along with that, they updated their software which I installed on my iPad yesterday. One new feature is the "Night Shift" option. Night shift removes some of the blue light from your screen during evening hours. The theory is that all of us who use our devices an hour or two before bed are getting less or poorer sleep due to the 'blue light' emitted from the screens. It is said that it messes with our brain and sleep chemicals our body produces to help us become tired and fall asleep. But the jury is still out on whether this is true or not, or how much it actually affects sleep. 

However, what is known is that blue light is damaging to our eyes. I know this from my eye doctor and since I wear glasses, I am always offered (and encouraged, since I have a job using a computer) to add a protective coating to my lenses that helps block the damaging effects. 

I tried out the "Night Shift" option last night, and it basically makes your screen more orangey. But after some time, you get used to it. And when I went to turn it back off, the quick shift back to normal on my screen actually hurt my eyes. Apple is pushing this as a way to help us sleep with set hours for the option to come on the evenings, but I'm wondering if it should be enabled all the time? If my eyes were already more comfortable in that short time, maybe it's something for me to consider. The problem is, being the designer and creative I am, I like my colors to be as true as possible. White is no longer white, it's a warm off-white. I went back and forth with LED lightbulbs because I didn't like the slightly different light they cast, but now I admit I'm used to it and don't notice as much if it's different than incandescent. I'm due for my yearly eye checkup, and I think I'm going to ask my doc about this feature, see what he says. But maybe I should just put up with it for the sake of my eyes? 

Nummer Drei
As Lent comes to a close, I'm faced with a decision: keep up with my Lenten resolution, or go back to old habits? I semi-failed at my first Lenten resolution, so partially in to Lent I switched it up and gave up Facebook on my phone. I need it for my job, so I couldn't just stop entirely, but taking it off my phone felt like a decent plan. 

The first week was the hardest, and I realized that checking it was something that was hardwired into my brain, because I would swipe over and hit Facebook with no thought, only to be met by the login screen because I forgot I signed out for Lent. I had this innate desire to look at it for that first week, but once I got past that point it wasn't so bad. For the most part I didn't miss it a whole lot. I won't pretend I was necessarily making 'better' use of my time, but I'd rather watch a show or movie I enjoy, or read or crochet, or just sit in silence, than scroll through stuff on my phone. So personally, I find that a better use of my time, even if it's still not all that useful, haha.

For now, I think I'm going to stay logged out. I'll allow myself to log in on occasions I need to, like for a group I help manage, but I want to try to stick with this. I'm a bit of a news junkie, which fits well with my job, but I gotta be honest that the election coverage is really getting me down. I realized that seeing those headlines so often—even though it's unintentional—in my feed is bad, and I need to distance myself from it. When I log in to Facebook less, like I have been, the most important stories are on top from people I care about, it takes no time to get through them, and the rest is just filler.

Allergies: The Bane of My Existence Right Now

Last week, I started up with allergies. Off and on I'd have days with sniffles, drainage, and increased cough. I've gone through like 4 boxes of tissues in the past week. It became clear that my Zyrtec wasn't working for me anymore and it was time to switch to something else. This is common—even though it sucks—where your body gets used to an allergy med and then it doesn't work anymore.

Tuesday I had a checkup with my doctor, and we agreed to give Allegra a try. And I had a good checkup, too. My PFT's were still pretty good, though not as good as a month ago when I had those unbelievable numbers. But I still had not lost much ground and I blamed most of it on the allergies.

Wednesday... totally different story. I was blowing my nose constantly and coughing my head off. It was a terrible day, and it had been a terrible night too; I got little sleep and woke up coughing 3-4 times. I was starting to worry I was sick, but it just doesn't make sense because Jarrod hasn't caught anything from me and this just feels like allergies.

Thursday I started the Allegra and noticed some improvements as far as drainage and cough, and I thought I was getting around okay until I went to treadmill... I could not breathe in deeply at all and could only make it 15 minutes. My oxygen sats were awful.

Today is worse. I'm coughing my butt off this morning and I don't even feel like I took allergy medicine.

I feel like if I'm going to have any chance of maintaining my good numbers, I need to get better fast, and that's the most frustrating part: knowing that I need to turn this around NOW, not later, and every day that I can't is another day I'm more likely to stay this way. I need to clear out the gunk in my lungs before it settles in and is harder to clear out days later.

It's just so frustrating, maddening almost. Of all the things that come with having CF, of all the daily things I go through, this is possibly the most aggravating thing of all.

It's not the 2+ hours of daily treatments, the 30+ daily pills, coughing for 1-3 hours every morning, the oxygen tubing... It's the fact that one day can be so vastly different from the next, with no apparent warning or reason. On Sunday I felt great, and did a lot at the gym, Monday was decent, Tuesday I had a good checkup, and then Wednesday it all just went to craps and all of my progress at the gym on Sunday was pointless. I'm back to square one though no fault of my own. I'm doing about everything I can to stay on top of this, yet these allergies are making my life terrible right now.

It just plain sucks and I cannot put into words how frustrated I am.