A Little Background

When CFer's have our checkups, we call them clinic visits.  I typically go every three months, unless I get sick.  But even when I get sick, I am lucky enough that my doctor doesn't necessarily need to see me.  He will call in some meds and I am good to go from home.

When a CFer gets sick with a lung infection, it can take any number of medications to get us better.  There are a few oral antibiotics, which for a non-cfer, would be considered the big guns, the good stuff,  or really strong meds.  For a CFer, these meds are simply old hat.  We've been on them 218,937 times (or something like that), we know the drill.  For a CFer, the "big guns" are IV antibiotics…which for some are also "old hat".  We've also been on these many times, but when we are on these is typically when the others don't work or we aren't getting better or we keep getting sick.

I have been extremely blessed over the last three years in that I have only had to use oral antibiotics.  It has been a whole three and a half plus years since I was hospitalized for a lung infection.  It has been three years and about 2 months since I was on home IV's.  I have several theories as to why I have been this healthy:

1) I don't teach anymore.  I went to college to pursue a degree in education and I was able to finish my college career in 4.5 years.  Again, I was relatively lucky in my health.  When I finished college, I decided to substitute teach, hoping that someday I'd break into a local school district and have the job of my dreams.  That never happened.  For that, I am grateful.  I subbed, (including several long term positions in the same classroom for weeks at a time) for around 5 years and was sick ALL the time.  Also teaching put a huge stress on my body…the workload was tough and I dealt with a lot of needy students (for lack of a better word).  I was emotionally drained thinking about "my kids" and what they went through on a daily basis.  It hurt my heart to see them struggling in school and know that they weren't getting the help they needed outside of school.  I just wanted to help them all.  To this day, I still think of many of them and it has been four years since my last subbing job ended.

2) My husband and I bought a house.  We were living in an apartment building with lots of other people…and smokers and animals.  Honestly, even though the animals and smoke were within the walls of their own apartments, I think it definitely affected me negatively.  We love our home and couldn't be happier with the location.

3) Also, when I was subbing, I was working two jobs.  Subs don't really make much money and I didn't want to get rid of my retail job in case I needed to fall back on something.  So I subbed most days and then worked retail 2-3 nights a week and on one weekend day.  It was extremely stressful and put a huge strain on my body.  When I stopped subbing, I stayed with my retail job for 3 years until last summer when I got a new job in customer service.  With this I am able to work 37.5 hours a week and be home to cook dinner.  I have a better commute and am able to spend more time on my treatments.  And I don't have to take work home and I enjoy my colleagues.

I was going to post my clinic update along with this post, but I am kind of running out of time here.  So I will split it and update my clinic visit next time.  :)