Quite an improvement

Well, things seem to be improving quite a bit even if it doesn't look like it at times and hopefully I'll soon be well enough to travel home. Certainly wasn't three months or so ago when I was taken by car to Leicester Royal Infirmary to see a consultant there. It was a nice journey but I started producing really large beads of sweat and my symptoms worsened for the next few days. It wasn't as if it was a difficult journey or anything .. infact I enjoyed it but coming back I started feeling very tired and ill and things started going wrong. I enjoyed the time out though it was quite clear that travelling still wasn't for me.

I was actually meant to go in as an in patient but there was a sickness and diarrhea bug problem on the ward I was meant to be going into so they said to just come up to the day clinic. Fortunately I didn't catch the bug. A nurse had gone with me and we just went to the clinic saw the specialist and went back to the hospital in Warwick. We were driven there and back by a volunteer.

I'd been told not to walk round too much in the hospital by my consultant at Warwick and finding out what a relatively short car journey could do made me more careful. Not that I could get very far anyway because of the breathing problem. I'd walk down to the hospital shop from my ward stopping to rest in the chapel and then walking on to the shop, the same on the way back.

I just had to find a balance between getting some exercise and exercising too much.

As I said .. things are improving. I can expand my lungs enough now to be able to cough properly and last week managed to walk down to the post office .. though not back again and I was ok for a couple of days. Then the muscles started moving again to an extent where I had breathing problems again as my lungs had to cope with the changes in breathing. It's all such a slow process. Still things've moved on from the time when things were so tight I could just about cough and it was so painful. Now there's much more movement and the pain when I cough is no where as near as bad as it was.

Up .. etc

Well, back from the hospital and the butterfly diary. I've been out for about a month now. Things aren't easy but you just have to get on with things as they are. My breathing's bad .. as is the pain at times.

Still, I get out a bit .. my main shopping I need help with. I can't carry it though am not too bad if I support myself on the trolley as I wheel it round the supermarket .. it's the carrying that is the hard part. Without the trolley I can't move very far without becoming breathless.

So, I have to have help. Sometimes I'll walk over to the small Tesco but I have to rest up a few times. Waterstones is excellent. I have mum's stick to use .. found it in the flat and it supports me a little. She would never use it .. but then I guess she had the choice.

Done half me pills and I suppose I should go and do the rest. My marking them off is a bit more complicated now .. as I'd get thrown off track if the phone went. If you've two pills in the hand and you're meant to be taking three .. did you just take two out or have you taken all three out of the packet and swallowed one? A friend of mine back in London said he found it hard enough to remember if he'd taken the one pill he has a day .. let alone trying to remember taking the amount I do!!!!

So now my pill taking sheet doesn't just have one box to tick next to each medicine. I put the name of the medicine, then how much of it I have to take, then there are two boxes to tick off .. one for when I take the pills out of their containers and one for when I've swallowed them. I also write down the time I took them so that I don't take them too close to each other and me pill sheet is divided into breakfast, midday, tea and supper with the pills I have to take then listed under each heading. And I put the day and date at the top of the sheet so that there's no mistake there too.

I don't have to take the steroid sparing drug an hour before food anymore according to the label on the bottle and I didn't in hospital either, possibly because I'm not on so many steroids now as the steroid sparing drugs have taken over their role and I'm not taking so many of them at once in the morning as I was before the steroid sparing drugs had kicked in. It can take quite a while before they do.

Better potter off and sort the rest out actually. Right, all done and ticked off for the morning.

I have started meditating again .. though only yesterday evening. Twenty minutes then and twenty minutes this morning. I read that forty minutes at a time is a good idea but for now have decided to do it this way. Actually felt the relaxation coming in this morning. So, there you go. Just using a mantra to clear the mind.

I'd got some angel cards from The Works and had pulled out a card to meditate on a little while ago. It'd been Raphael which is an archetype for healing. I didn't get round to meditating on that though.