Blue-Eyed Breather

I am finally deaccessed (again) and finished with this course of IV antibiotics (again)!!!!!!! Hallelujah. I've been on IVs for almost seven weeks of the summer, which has seemed like forever. Maybe I can actually have a real summer vacation now, complete with swimming, enjoying the outdoors, and sleeping through the night?! We'll see. I know the IVs keep me as healthy as possible, and my lungs need all the help they can get, but I am SO ready to have a break from IVs for (hopefully) a few months! Tata for now. I'm off to enjoy my freedom. :)

Wow, what a week. Last Tuesday, I went to the doctor. My lungs weren't doing well, and I was having a pretty severe pain in my right middle lobe area. The appointment went in a completely unexpected direction. My doctor wanted to do a bronchoscopy Thursday to see if we were missing anything down in my lungs. Although a bronchoscopy is not an invasive surgery, I still had to have anesthesia and miss Thursday and Friday of work. My doctor also wanted me to follow the bronch up with three weeks of IV antibiotics, even though I just finished a course of antibiotics about a month ago. I was strongly opposed to missing work, but I still had the bronch Thursday and started IVs. The bronchoscopy went fine. My doctor took several sputum cultures from different areas of my lungs so if any new bacteria is invading them, we'll be able to see soon. The anesthesia from the surgery wiped me out--I had absolutely no energy Thursday through Sunday. I'm not sure if I've ever slept as muc...

I cannot wait to be finished with my IV antibiotics. Granted, the IVs themselves haven't been that bad. The nausea has been manageable, and my port has behaved fairly well (at least, it's been well-behaved for my port). The worst part about this course of IVs has been dealing with the tape. The most common form of medical tape is called Tegaderm. I used to use this kind of tape on my PICC lines until my skin reacted violently against it a few years ago. So, I switched to IV3000. That tape has been life-saving for my skin. I managed to have many PICC lines and port accesses where my skin has stayed healthy. I hoped IV3000 would not have the same problems as Tegaderm. I mean, surely my skin can't react as badly as it had previously, right? Wrong. This past week and a half, my skin has gotten worse and worse. It is red and is covered in all these itchy bumps under the tape, but I can't do anything about it. My port has to be Protected somehow, and currently, I'...