Lots of stuff....

Lordy, I have neglected my blogspot once again. I admittedly have been very active on Facebook and nearly forgot about my own blog until I started to catch up on some of my friends. Lemme see, so much has happened. Good news is that my daughter passed her driver's test and is now officially on the road (actually, this scares me a little...she has given a few near heart attacks while practicing). She now has a car, not just any car, but a very nostalgic 1986 Plymouth Horizon. Remember those, folks? Any child of the 80's would. My first car was a Dodge Omni, looks just like the Plymouth in nearly every way. It even sounds like it LOL! I rode with Kelly to the store the day she got it on the road and so many memories came back to me. How I cracked my Omni's oilpan when I drifted into the ditch (hey, there are several around where I live!), how it had no shocks and you could feel every pebble in the road. But despite these shortcomings, it was a good car. It started when it was supposed to, sometimes under severe protest on the coldest of days, but after a few whines, the engine would roar to life. Such memories. I am sure that Kelly will have many memories of her own to share down the road to her own kids.

The kids have started back to school, okay...about a month ago and are doing well. Kelly is in her senior year which to me doesn't seem possible at all. She will be leaving the nest in under a year, going her own direction in life. Hopefully without too many twists and turns but knowing her, she would embrace them all and move on. Patrick is in his 10th year...I am just praying that he does better this year. He will admit that he was lazy and didn't do anything last year. Well, because of that, he needs to repeat nearly every class that he had last year. He was warned, by everyone and now he sees that he has to redo everything and has vowed to do his work. I hope so. ll

I am doing well in my new apartment, it is very nice to have my space. It looks lived in now, with two teenagers, how could it not? LOL. I have had a few setbacks as far as my health though. I guess it started with June and really hasn't stopped there. I wound up with a lung infection then, started orals...they failed and a short burst of IV's followed. I was okay for a little bit and then September nailed me to the wall. I was hit hard, the PA and some other creepy bug was really flaring up. Of course I started 3 orals, they failed, and then I started outpatient IV's where I had to go to the hospital twice a day to get 2 hour infusions. That's four hours a day ,people and that's if nothing went wrong such as a delay in pharmacy, or the floor was busy. A two hour infusion could easily turn into 3 or even more. After a full week of going back and forth, the really high temps began. I felt so bad, my lungs were killing me, I had this splitting headache all of the time and I just felt blah. After one of my infusions and a final temp of 102, I went to the ER. This was at my local hospital, I usually bypass them and go straight to UConn, but I really felt that bad that it could not wait until morning. And so at midnight, I was lying on one of their stretchers. I had the usual done to me, blood and sputum cultures, lab work and a chest X ray, after which the ER doc comes in and pronounces me to be very sick. I have pneumonia and need even more intense IV's. I of course was admitted and put on 3 very strong IV's...Vanco, Fortaz and Imepenem. Other than the drama with my ventilator...and butting heads with RT, it wasn't a bad admission. My primary doc took very good care of me, she knows me as well as my pulmo so I did feel like I was in good hands. I was there a week and released, I actually felt pretty good and now the crud is back. So, now I am back on orals and I see pulmo next week. Hopefully this new combination will keep the bacteria at bay....I have never been on this combo so we will see.

And so...that's it in a nutshell. Oh, next week I get my PFT's done after years of not having them done (because of the vent). Now that I am off of the vent most of the day, PFT's need to be done. I am so curious, I will be ecstatic if it reads 40% of lung function. I could live with that.

Okay, so I have rambled enough, probably thrown more at you guys than I should have in one entry but it has been oh so very long since my last scribble here. If you have made it this far reading my blog, congrats! You are still awake LOL! And...thanks :)

Until next time, Jenn :)