Listen to Your (Lungs) Body

I can tell that I'm coming towards the finish line folks. It's getting harder and harder to fall asleep and then I of course feel more and more tired each morning. I realize it's a cycle that I need to break, but I also have other symptoms that point to needing a tune-up. Where should I start? I'm starting to cough up thicker, larger and greener blobs of mucus. I feel slightly sick after every meal. I'm not sleeping as well due to coughing during the night. My stools are getting to the point that we have to repaint the bathroom after every time I'm in there cause the paint starts peeling from the walls. I'm sure there is a myriad of other things but I don't want to sound like I'm complaining, cause I'm certainly not. My point is, when you know, you know.

As a CFer you need to get a good feel for your body and listen to it when it's either whispering to you OR yelling loudly in your ear. After 29 years of doing this, I'll I need is a whisper from my body and I know it's that time. Too many of my CF friends ignore what their body and specifically lungs are YELLING at them and put off extra treatment or a hospital stay. And I know you've heard this 1,000,000 times from doctors, but lung damage is irreversible. Now that doesn't mean that you can't improve you PFT's, but what it does mean is that if your lung turns to scar tissue in parts, that lung ain't coming back. And if that lung ain't coming back, the chance of your numbers increasing get slimmer and slimmer. You need to stop the downhill slide when you start down the hill, not when you've reached the bottom. Ok, enough preaching for today! Now on to my workouts.

6:00pm: So today was another crazy "off" day. It was busy in parts and slow moving in others, but by the time I was ready to go to the gym, it was too late. Don't get me wrong, I still could have physically went to the gym, but I didn't feel like fighting the crowd. From about 5:30pm to 7:00pm it feels like you're in some packed dance club. I'm not a huge fan of dodging people while I lift, so I decided to stay at Mandi's and use some weights she has at her house to lift on my shoulders. It went well, but I got pain in them shortly after the workout started, so I limited myself to just 3 different lifts. Free weights have a tendency to do that with my shoulders, but I was hoping that they wouldn't notice that I wasn't at the gym :)

After lifting, and eating some Indian food (I think) with Mandi's parents, Mandi and I set off on a dog walk. Jezzabel was super excited for her walk and grabbed her leash and started walking herself before I had a chance to grab it from her. Her excitement did fade a little bit though as we set out on our walk and the temperature of the air hit us like a hot punch from Iron Mike. As I type this (it's 11:10pm) it's still 99 degrees outside. That means that during our walk it was over 100! The sun was setting as we were walking which was beautiful to see, but that beauty certainly didn't stop the sweat from covering my body. I was dripping liquid by the time we got back to the house. In fact, when we got back inside, Mandi's brother said, "Apparently it's still hot outside" after seeing the streams of salt water fall off my body. Here's the best news of all though: My feet don't hurt one bit. Maybe these orthotics are going to do the trick?!

Total Distance: 2.0 miles

Total Distance for Day: 2.0 miles