That was scary.

[rivka]

So: that breathing issue I was having.

The inhaler I got last week worked really well for a while. It's not a "heavens open, choirs sing" experience like a nebulizer breathing treatment is. But I'd find that when the slow-strangulation feeling began to creep up on me, it was inevitably six hours after the last dose and time to use the inhaler again.

This morning I felt pretty well. We walked to church, although I then did a fair bit of coughing. We walked home from church, and afterward even though it had only been three hours since the last treatment I felt like someone was sitting on my chest. I decided it would be okay to take the dose at four hours instead of six.

I went and picked up the visiting oursin and had a lovely time chatting with her and showing her a bit of Baltimore. As time wore on I had more and more coughing, though, and had to keep my breathing very carefully shallow. When I came home at 3:45 it had only been two hours and a bit since the last dose, and I couldn't catch my breath and couldn't catch my breath.

I started noticing that it was quite an effort to take those careful shallow breaths: pull-push, pull-push. My head hurt. I felt lightheaded.

Michael and I spent some time debating our options. In the end, the whole family piled in the car and Michael drove me to Patient First, an urgent-care clinic. My breathing continued to be shallower and more labored and more uncomfortable. At Patient First, I got to jump the line and be taken straight back.

Hosanna! They gave me another breathing treatment, almost right away, and it was fantastically wonderful. It did turn out that all the incredibly hard work I was doing was paying off: my pulse ox was 97%. So I wasn't as oxygen-starved as I felt. I had the breathing treatment and a chest X-ray. I came home with steroids and antibiotics. The doctor swears that the steroids will make me instantly better. Here's hoping.

I was mightily impressed with the care experience. Everyone at Patient First was kind and seemed to take me seriously. The best part of their model: prescriptions are fully integrated into their service. It's not that the Patient First doctor writes a prescription and then you walk down the hall to the Patient First pharmacy to have it filled; the doctor talked to me, walked out of the room for a minute or two, and came back with my medications himself. Not samples, either, but regular medication packs labeled with my name and bearing full pharmacy education sheets. Not having that extra step makes a huge difference when you're really sick.

The breathing treatment lasted me from then until now. Those things really are awesome. It was so scary to just not be able to breathe like that, and to have it worsen so quickly from a previously managable level.

Comments

[wcg.livejournal.com]

What a relief that you got such prompt and effective care.

[txanne.livejournal.com]

Yeeeesh. I'm glad you were seen quickly and competently! And my sympathies on the steroids. They're indisputably better than not breathing, anyway....

[badgerbag.livejournal.com]

Oh scary. It makes a huge difference to know how to manage it, breathe slowly, and move slowly. Steroids like oral steroids or like the inhaled kind? Prednisone makes my breathing get better so fast it makes me want to cry... Fingers crossed it will work for you.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

Oral steroids - Medrol/methylprednisolone. It's one of those packs where I took six pills tonight, and it'll be five pills tomorrow on down to one pill on Friday. There was just albuterol in the breathing treatment they gave me, and I have an albuterol inhaler.

[naomikritzer]

FYI, in case they didn't warn you -- steroids make many people cranky as hell. If it feels tomorrow like everyone in the world is trying to piss you off, it may be the drugs. (Ed had steroids for hives once, and was not warned about this. Neither was I. Come to think of it, I probably needed the warning more than he did.)

[jenett]

And to add to Naomi's comment: don't know if it's as true for the pill forms, but the inhaled forms make me bruise absurdly easily. (Not badly, just in that "I'm pretty sure I didn't crash my leg into a table *that* hard without noticing" way that can have you wondering about your memory too, if you don't know about this.)

Though, with a shortish dose, I hope you will miss that one.

[jenett]

Yay for excellent care. Boo on your lungs not behaving the way they should. While I am a member of that club, I did not want more people I like to join it.

The sense of panic is the hardest thing to describe, for me, because it's all about "Aargh, can't breathe" at the same time all the actual panic actions (frantic movement towards a solution, talking a lot) take air that's already hard to get.

If you have a heating pad or something else you can use between your shoulder blades to keep the muscles and connective tissue there from cramping, I recommend it.

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

Not being able to breathe well is absolutely terrifying; I had pneumonia once and it scared the living daylights out of me.

Are you seeing a specialist yet? You might want to consider it, if insurance permits; once the specialist pins down the exact diagnosis, a GP may be able to manage your treatment.

[bosssio.livejournal.com]

yeah, I have totally been there. The american Lung association has it right "when you cannot breathe, nothing else matters"

Glad to hear you are doing better, and I wish everyone had access to urgent care when it is needed!

[curiousangel.livejournal.com]

My favorite part of my own PatientFirst experience came when I was talking with the doctor. I had gone in with an earache, afraid that it was an infection, and she quickly put my mind at rest about that. She also checked to see if I was seeking narcotics, but when I looked at her quizzically and said, "It's just an earache, ibuprofen will be fine, thanks", she was visibly relieved.

The great part came right after that. The doctor I saw was the assistant medical director for the entire facility, and was clearly REALLY BUSY. However, she looked me right in the eye and said, "Do you have any other questions?", and then she stopped and LISTENED to me.

Everything else in her world stopped at that moment. It was very plain that she was focused on me, and what I had to say, and was going to deal with it, whatever it might be. It was clear that I didn't have forty-eleven different things wrong with me, and that I wasn't going to take up a huge amount of her time, but for that moment, she and I were the only two people in the world who had anything worthwhile to say. She had been bustling around the exam room, doing lots of different things; still, everything but her breathing stopped while she was LISTENING to me.

I'd gone in there to have someone with a medical license decide if I needed antibiotics for ear pain, which was pretty damn trivial, but if I'd needed to talk about some health issue, she'd have been there, listening to me. She was very deliberate about that, and it made me feel so much more reassured about the medical attention I'd received, and about the place in general.

[selki.livejournal.com]

That sounds like a great place.

I've had very good experiences with the urgent care center in my hometown. I didn't even realize there were any in Md.

[juno.livejournal.com]

Glad you're ok and that the experience at urgent care was good.

One thing that really helped my asthma (I assuming you're having an asthma type of issue) is acupuncture. Helped as in - do not need daily treatment and can't remember when I last used my rescue inhaler.
I mention this only as it really helped me and is not something that a lot of doctors think to mention. I was going about once every 2 weeks when the asthma was bad but now haven't been in a while and it seems to be ok.

Japanese style needles are smaller and don't hurt.

[redbird]

That is scary. Patient First sounds like a good thing, and I'm glad they were able to take care of your problem so quickly and well.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

I'm so sorry to hear this - but glad you managed to get such helpful treatment.

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

I can completely relate to all of this. I used to have asthma that got bad in around my first year of University. The times I had serious attacks were very scary, and the nebulizer treatment is the most awesome thing in the entire world. The times that I had bad attacks that the inhaler didn't help with were even more scary. Sadly, the "see to you IMMEDIATELY" thing didn't happen for me, and I think that scariest of all was sitting on a cot in a hospital emergency alone not able to breathe properly and waiting for someone to come and hoping they'd come before I passed out / stopped breathing / died. But ultimately I always got treatment and it made a huge difference.

Oddly, it kind of just went away on its own, so I can't make any recommendations at all on that front. I may have gotten steroids but I can't be sure -- I don't really recall.

[kalmn.livejournal.com]

oh, scary. *hug*

i'm glad you're doing better-- i have known too many people who haven't taken care of their asthma to have anything much useful to say on it, but i have been sitting over here cheering "breathe, rivka, breathe!"

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

Have you considered buying a nebulizer? My lung damage started in 1986 and there weren't inhalers then. I had two nebulizers -- one in the car and one in the house -- and I had to use it every three or four hours around the clock.

Now that I have two inhalers that I take twice a day, I gave the car nebulizer away and keep the inside one in my closet. I haven't had to use it for a couple of years, but my primary doctor gives me new meds each year, just in case.