Posts Tagged ‘health’

Cardiac asthma, day two, the sequel I guess.

I am continuing to have the obvious symptoms of cardiac asthma that I’ve been having, although at this point I feel them more — the pressure on my chest that is surprisingly not my lungs (I know, right?), and more prevalent. When I take some of the medication that I’ve been prescribed or told to take, I don’t feel it severely, and sometimes not even all the time. Once the kids go on break from occupational and speech therapies, I’m going to call my primary care physician and ask for a referral to a cardiologist provided that I don’t need to seek emergent care sooner than that. Knowing me, I’ll be referred right back to the main hospital in this city for testing unless the cardiologist can do almost all or all of the testing in his office.

But thirty-somethings “don’t get” heart problems, even if they have a first-generation family history of them.

Okay, so cardiac asthma got me feeling like:

About every month to month and a half I feel like I’m “short of breath” for a few days even though my lungs, with the help of medication that I take as needed for bronchial asthma, are able to draw in air just fine. But people in their thirties “don’t have heart problems”, even though I very clearly do. If this continues to happen, as I’m sure it will, I’m going to ask for a referral to a cardiologist so that they can give me better medication to manage it than I am currently on. This is annoying, because I could definitely be doing better things this summer — better than dealing with this, at any rate. “Ways to stop feeling pressure on my chest” is fun…

Take aspirin.
Take aspirin with Benadryl.
Put prescription-strength lidocaine on my chest.
Take warm bath to force arteries, veins, and such to dilate rather than constrict.

…nope, it’s still definitely there, I still definitely have cardiac asthma, but it is helping a little bit.

Well, I got my fasting blood draw results back!

All of the lipids are out of bounds (it’s actually suggested on the results page that I may have familial hypercholesterolemia because of how high they are, so I know it’s being taken at least slightly seriously).

My urea nitrogen count was also noticeably low, and not even slightly.

My A1C jumped from a baseline of 5.5 all the way to 6, although I do have a family history of that.

And my white blood cell count was also perceptibly high.

Aside from the familial hypercholesterolemia, we get to find out why all of these are out of range.

I’m finally almost done taking Paxlovid, y’all!

I’m not sure if my fever is back because of COVID, if it’s because I tried to stop coasting off of a low dose of prednisone to keep from coughing (as the poison seems to cure the poison in this case) or… what, but I suppose I’ll be finding out as the day goes on. I’m due to take my last dose of Paxlovid this evening, and then my primary care physician wants me to make an appointment to see him sometime next week — depending on his availability, that is — to make sure that I don’t have any long-term… problems (writing posts while on Paxlovid is fun, I swear) as a result of this, and to make sure that it hasn’t worsened my heart or lung problems. Ironically, the only thing that I’m protected from is the cytokine… thing that happens at the end of some COVID-19 infections because I’m immunocompromised, and people who are immunocompromised can’t surmount a cytokine response like that in a lot of — almost all — cases, which is probably the only good thing to come out of all of this and my circumstances. It’s the cytokine (over-)response that kills people.

Then again, with the health problems that I have, COVID-19 could simply kill me by virtue of killing me, so me actually coming down with it was never ideal in the first place. I tried hard for three years to prevent that.

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