Breathing Deeply: My Life With Cystic Fibrosis

Wednesday night my CF doctor came by and told me that I'd be able to go home on Thursday. He did want to check on my lung function and make sure that it was still making positive progress. Thursday afternoon the pulmonary function lab called and asked me to come down for a 6 minute walking test (6mwt) and spirometry.

The 6mwt is a test that measures how much ground I can cover in 6 minutes while walking at a fairly aggressive pace. What the respiratory technician does is hook up a pulse oximeter to my finger, and keeps a constant reading on what my saturation is doing. That way they can tell if my saturations go down when I exercise. I kicked some serious butt on the walking test. I covered more ground than I have in a long time, and my oxygen saturation stayed nice and high the entire time.

After the 6mwt I had to do spirometry to measure my lung function. I wish they had done the tests in the opposite order, because I was a little bit winded from the walk. Thankfully I was still able to perform better on the spirometry than I had the time before. My FEV1 went up just a tiny pinch, but since it was an improvement, the doctors were happy.

The attending doctor came around 2:00 with the resident doctors and they said they were going to go ahead and write up my paperwork so I could go home. I was so happy I immediately started packing up all the stuff I had taken with me to the hospital. By the time Brad showed up I was all ready to go! I really love that he works on the UCSD campus. Having him close by is really good for my state of mind.

By 3:30 we were home. I wasn't quite sure what to do with myself after having been cooped up in that hospital room for a week. I wandered around the house for awhile just enjoying being around my own stuff again. I let Gimli out of his cage so he could have some freedom too. Brad took a quick trip to the grocery store to get me some milk and other high-calorie things for me.

It's so great to be back home. Brad had a get-together with some of his computer buddies last night, and I fell asleep on the couch while watching Jaws III. When Brad came home he started my IV for me and tucked me into bed--our OWN bed! I slept so incredibly well. I woke up a couple of times, but had no trouble falling back asleep. Quite a change from the hospital. I woke up this morning actually feeling refreshed. Ahhhh. It's such a great feeling of peace and calm to be home.