Confession

Forgive me, readers and followers, for I have sinned against you by not blogging for ten months.

They have not been easy months, but they have been productive.  We closed on our house November 1st and moved in over the Thanksgiving weekend.  No more hiding from stressful situations.  There was much packing, unpacking, and settling in to do.  I’m back on daily steroid supplementation.  I don’t quite have full sail, but I’m sailing at a steady pace.

A few months after surgery, I  was able to get off Lasix but had to so back on it a few moths later.  In January, I started having issues with low salt and finally figured out that the Lasix was flushing salt.  PCdoc took me off the Lasix again (with permission to take an occasional dose if needed) and I’ve done quite well without it even though I am now eating a high-salt diet.  On the rare occasion that I get enough salt to cause my feet to swell, I just drink more water to flush it out.  It’s still a balancing act, but I’m getting better at it.

In March I got a stomach bug.  It started with the same symptoms I get with low cortisol: fatigue, nausea, diarrhea.  I increased my steroids incrementally until I got to 80 mg. because I wasn’t keeping it all down. By then I knew it wasn’t just low cortisol.  I managed to keep enough Zofran down to reduce the vomiting to every two hours.  Then I was able to eat a few bites and drink a bit of water.  On the third day, I finally called PCdoc for an anti-diarrheal because nothing over-the-counter helped.  The bug held out a few more days but finally went away.  I should have gone to Urgent Care for fluids (which would have replaced both the water and the salt I was losing) but I was just too sick to leave the house. 

It took several weeks for me to get my strength back.  Next time I will go to Urgent Care immediately if the first extra dose of steroids doesn’t stop the symptoms.  I’m pretty sure staying properly hydrated and salted early on would have sped my recovery.
 
I’ve tried to wean off the steroids since then. I can go to 12.5 mg for a few days, but haven’t been able to stabilize on that dose.  I’m stable on 15 mg.

That’s enough for now.  More soon.  Thanks for your patience and emails during my silence.