Breathing Deeply: My Life With Cystic Fibrosis

I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That's deep enough. What do you want, an adorable pancreas? --Jean Kerr

Actually, it's not an adorable pancreas that I'd want. A fully functioning one would do quite nicely. I ended up staying home from work today. When I woke up this morning I felt like ick on a stick, so after letting my boss know the plan, I crawled right back into bed and stayed there until about 1:30 this afternoon. Needing extra sleep is usually one of the signs that I'm fighting an infection of some sort. It's been a week now on the Levaquin antibiotic, and so far I'm not itchy or anything, so that's a good sign. I just hope I'm absorbing enough of it to be effective. Usually when I start a round of antibiotics I'm quite tired, but then I rebound.

I also flushed my port-a-cath today. I normally do that on the first of every month, but I was a bit swamped with the doctor appointment and stuff that day, and it slipped my mind afterwards. Having waited a week didn't seem to cause a problem though. I got the needle in on the first try and pushed the saline through at a respectable pace. It's funny, I've been doing my own flushing for so long now that it doesn't even hurt anymore. It feels more like putting in an earring. The needle just slips right in.

I try not to flush it too fast because if I do, I can taste the salt water. Blech! I followed the saline with heparin to keep the line clear for another month, and I'm good to go. It's seriously nothing short of a miracle that the port has been problem free for so long. I can't even explain how awesome it is to have that thing instead of fighting with a PICC line. I get the heebie jeebies just thinking about it. *shudder*

Now I'll just keep praying that the oral antibiotics do their thing so that I can avoid a tune-up for the next month or two. I've still got some other health related stuff I need to take care of before the end of the month, so if any of my praying friends are reading this, please pray that I won't hit any snags with scheduling my x-rays and stuff.

In other news, Brad and I decorated our Christmas trees today (yes, that's right...plural). There's a whole tree story that I'll tell later. Anywho, we put some ornaments up and strung the lighted garland across the top of the entertainment center. We still have to unpack the Nativity scene and decide where to set it up. That will probably happen on Saturday. Wow. Time flies.

Speaking of which, I should try to get some more sleep. Despite all my napping today, I still need to rest.