Thursday, January 20, 2011

Hello? Hello? Anybody out there?

It's been a while. My apologies for playing least in the sight the past few months, but I've had a serious lack of motivation to write - which is unusual for me. I hesitate to write when I have nothing new to report and (fortunately) life has been pretty routine lately (you know the drill - work, sleep, play, hospital {rinse & repeat}).

I survived another 20-day visit to Club Med in December and made it home just in time for the holidays. Spent lots of time with the fam, which was fabulous and started back to le job two days after Christmas. Since then I've been absorbed in work and trying to stay well.

Today was my one-month post-hospital clinic visit. Not exactly a stellar report, but it's been a pretty sub-par month for me. I haven't been Sick (in my world there's "Sick" (which equates to hospital time) and "sick" (which means I don't feel great, but not bad enough that I'm willing to do anything about it). I've had a stomach bug and some other infection that I couldn't really pinpoint (but I knew my body was fighting something because my lymph nodes were swollen to about the size of a nickel for about a week & a half).

So today, my FEV1 was down 7% from discharge, which was Not. Cool. The nurse threatened me with another round of IV abx but I managed to sweet talk my way into two weeks of oral abx (Levaquin & Bactrim).

It also appears that Cayston and I are going to have to part ways. After six days of SOB & wheezing and three days of hemoptysis, I decided to take a break. Determined to give it the old college try, I waited three days and decided to go one more round. Cayston = 2, Brandi = 0. Based on that, the docs recommended stopping the Cayston for now. If we have to bring it back into the arsenal later, we'll see if I can tolerate it then.

In other news, I'm very excited about an opportunity that I've received at work. Beginning Monday, I'll be shadowing a new manager and will begin learning how to do Compliance Monitoring (reviews). I'm very excited because this keeps me with the same team that I've been working with, but allows me to move outside the world of official complaints. Seeing as how I've been working with complaints in some form or fashion for the past seven years, I'm really looking forward to the change. It will also be a great opportunity to learn each regulation more in-depth which will be a huge bonus when I start studying for my CRCM (Certified Regulatory Compliance Manager) next year.

That's all for now, folks. Catch ya on the flip side!

1 comments:

Stacey said...

Ugh...sorry about the PFT drop. Hoping the orals do the trick and you bounce back.