Sniffles

Inspirational song: Hurt (Johnny Cash)

This year’s schedule suddenly got complicated. I’ve already begun shuffling and delaying what I can. There’s more that will have to be factored in, but I won’t have access to that data for two weeks. That last bit has the potential to be every bit as disruptive as this morning’s news.

We went down to Anschutz again this morning. I asked the Mr to drive, expecting the roads to be slightly squirrelly after yesterday’s snow. It was wet but clear, but I was still glad for him to be my driver. I barely slept at all last night, waking up for a solid hour at 3:30. He got me there in time for my two appointments, which I doubt I’d have done successfully alone.

I would say that they re-ran the “sniff test” on my lungs, but this bore very little resemblance to the one they did up here. The first one was literally ten seconds tops. They stood me in front of an X-ray machine, had me take two deep breaths, and said, “okay, I don’t see signs of paralysis.” That was it. Today took much longer. They had me lie on a table, take three deep breaths and then three paced sniffs, in three different positions. Part of what they were looking for was a paradoxical movement of my diaphragm, where one side goes up with a deep breath instead of down. When the first radiology folks didn’t see that immediately, they shooed me out the door. Today’s radiology tech explained a whole lot more to me, but the radiologist who read the test wrote a report that was hard to read, apparently. My surgeon and his assistant read it aloud to me, and they couldn’t figure out what he meant. They went into the surgeon’s office to call him, and came back and simply said “paralyzed.” What this boils down to is sometime this year I will have my diaphragm surgically lowered. Three to four week recovery time. From here I expect to discuss with my primary care doc, report back to the pulmonologist, and then play the referral-prior authorization game with insurance.

I have decisions to make. First, obviously, is do I really want to do this? Second, if I go forward, I need to decide when. With a month of recovery, when does that work compared to everything going on this year. I might need to do it quickly, so that I am able to pick up a small person who weighs eight to ten pounds by summer. But geez. It seems like something I really have to think through before I agree to anything.

Photo has little to do with today, other than I was on the edge of a king sized bed, with the rest of it wide open, and this is where the cats insisted on sitting, including Alfred digging his big kitty soft paws into the exact spot where my diaphragm has failed.