Back in the trenches!

I have at last returned to work!! Yeehaw!! Even though I had to leave early (12:45) to get the first of three consecutive steroid infusions, I didn't mind. I was at work and being a productive member of society. I was wearing nice clothes and make-up that actually mattered. It was great. :)

It turns out that, under the infection (which I had), I also had "mild acute rejection", which basically means hit the body with steriods until the white blood cells calm down and go back to ignoring the fact that my lungs don't, technically, belong to me. So we're doing 3 steroid infusions, about 2 hours each, to make this happen, we hope. I go back to see Dr. A at 7:30 on Monday so we can see how we're doing. On the infection front, I am feeling a lot better there. The cough is better (mins the residual bronch/biopsy coughing, which goes on for awhile, since they like to really rummage around down there), the nose is better, so these are good things. The oxygen sats are still kind of bonkers but that's probably due to the rejection and not infection. It goes up to 98% or so, you just have to wait a little bit for it. It's like the Little Engine That Could, or something. So that's that. But hopefully we are on the right track now. Wooohoo! And tomorrow is already Friday. Beautiful, eh?

The bad thing about the steriod infusions is that you have the lovely metallic taste of steriod in your mouth the rest of the day. It starts about 45 min.-1 hr. in and then you're stuck. So I ate lunch before then, thankfully. The other thing is that your body really like steriods--it makes joints and such really happy. So when they stop them, things get cranky. Not looking forward to that so much. But since it's only once a day, and not 4x a day for almost a week like it was when I was an in-patient, I'm hoping it's not so bad this time. We'll see...