Welcome to my world….. This scenario plays itself out pretty much on a monthly basis for me. The only thing that really changes is how bad things will get and whether or not Ill end up on a ventilator. Be it be 1 or 2 weeks in the Intensive Care Unit, or in and out […]
Sub Glottic Stenosis (PGS) with asthma exacerbation. That’s how this most recent hospital admission is listed on the AVS (after visit summary). These conditions and the resulting hospitalization and treatment for them have turned me into a total train wreck. I started getting sick about 3 weeks ago with symptoms of breathlessness, air-trapping (dynamic lung […]
May is asthma awareness month, so I thought it would be fitting to share with you a 6 hour slice of a typical morning in this asthmatics life. No near-fatal exacerbations or depressing hospital photos this time around, just spontaneous mundane bits of me going about my daily routine, and rambling at the camera lens […]
Call me nieve, or maybe a just a wishful thinker, but I figured that because I’ve had to live my entire life with such awful breathing issues that maybe I’d be spared some of the more common health ailments that people tend to get as they get older. Who am I fooling, my entire universe […]
The following is about an incident that happened to me a few weeks ago involving, dare I say……… a vaccine. In a nutshell, I had a very severe reaction to one. Ive been hesitant to write about this, because I didn’t want to give the wrong impression or provide ammo for the vaccine nay-sayers. But […]
If you’ve just scratched the surface of my blog or even if you’ve been following me for years, you might be thinking, does this guy do anything else except spend time on ventilators in hospitals? Well, believe it or not, I spend very little time as a patient inside a hospital. In fact, just like […]
Continuing on the stenosis and scarring theme, you’re not gonna believe this one. So about 2 years ago my doctors and I noticed that every time I had a urinalysis done, either routine or because of a suspected UTI, the results would always show the presence of microscopic blood, anywhere from a trace to large […]
Expanding on my previous post…….. As if my life isn’t complicated enough, after learning more about this new condition I have called PGS (posterior glottic stenosis), its becoming increasingly apparent that this changes the way in which my severe asthma exacerbations will be treated in the future. It used to be that my biggest fear […]
It throws a new one at you. This time its “tracheal stenosis”, or more specifically in my case, “PGS ( Posterior Glottic Stenosis) “, which is basically a narrowing of the windpipe due to inflammation or the build up of scar tissue between or around the vocal cords. This scar tissue can impede the vocal […]
Need proof that asthma is an expensive disease? So far this year the medical bills associated with treating my asthma totals $1,362,067.99. And while that’s the most Ive racked up in a single year, on average it still costs about a half million dollars to keep this asthmatic alive, and most of that from taxpayer […]
You’ll probably have to zoom in on these images, but do any of the drug labels on my IV pole look familiar to you? You may have heard of these drugs before, but you might not beware that they are also used in the critical care treatment of severe asthma exacerbations, what they call status […]
Elite Asthma Fighter ( adj.): A “Badassmatic” who in the face of constant and severe exacerbations, is relentless in the fight and refuses to give in. Obviously all asthma flares that are severe enough to warrant treatment in an intensive care unit are bad, but for some of us, even the more potent and potentially […]
It seems I haven’t done a proper “Breathing Basics” post in almost 8 years. I think this installment might fit under that category. In browsing through some of the posts on various Asthma support groups, personal blogs, or in chatting with people who have asthma or COPD, I often hear someone refer to, or equate […]
