Lung Function Dropped 15% in 15 Days

It has been an eventful two weeks here in the Hope home and by eventful I mean terrifying. Let me back up to two weeks ago (give or take)

Life was grand at the end of June. Summer was in full force and I was feeling great. My days were spent in the garden tending to my vegetable plants, cooking obscene amounts of food from produce picked from said vegetable plants, swimming almost everyday, and spending time with my new little nephew. I felt really healthy and CF was behaving for the most part.

What felt like overnight I started to feel a little bit more congested and full in my lungs. I started waking up with a cough in the night. I started to feel a little more CFy (so not a real word) than usual. I had a clinic visit in a few days and didn't feel like I had an infection so I wasn't overly worried and made sure to keep up with treatments.

The weekend before clinic (why does everything bad happen over the weekend) I could tell something wasnt right. I did not feel like I was getting enough air even when I was completely inactive. My husband and I went to the pool (Kaylee too) and as we often do we had little competitions in the pool (while Kaylee was the official judge). You know, competitions you have in the pool when you are seven years old, yeah we still havre those. This particular day we had a treading water competition- I totally won, but could seriously tread water for hours...hubby on the other hand can last about 30 seconds before the lifeguard needs to be called in. Next, we wanted to see who could stay on the bottom of the pool longest. Hubby sinks like a rock, I float so I made it about .02 seconds and totally lost. I blame it on air pockets in my damaged lungs, but hubby doesn't buy it. We then tried to see who could swim underwater furthest without taking a breath of air. This is actually a fair fight because he holds his breath longer, but I am a much faster swimmer so it is always a close match. This particular day I lost so horribly I was actually ashamed. I knew my lungs were bad at the moment, but this was just depressing! After our competition I had to do my laps, but after 3 laps I felt as if I couldn't breath. I just couldn't catch my breath and had to get out of the pool to sit down. I was terrified for clinic the next day.

At clinic the doctor came in and I explained what was going on. I thought maybe it was an asthma flare up so he listened to my lungs. He quickly ruled out asthma as my lungs were quiet...too quiet. In fact he heard very little air flow. This was not good. Next, I got my FEV1 results. I was 15% below my low end baseline, 20% below my high end baseline. I am not sure I have ever seen numbers that low and the thoughts racing through my head were terrifying. How could I go from feeling amazing to completely breathless in such a short period of time with no sign of infection? I almost did not want to hear what the doctor had to say.


Up next- What the heck happened and what happened at todays clinic (one week later).