breathinstephen.com

Well it couldn’t have been more than an hour or two later when I started to notice that I just didn’t feel right. Just to make sure I wasn’t experiencing anything unusual, I Googled the side effects for the Shinrx vaccine and sure enough, fever was listed as a common side effect. Unable to sleep because of the fever, shaking chills and now increased breathlessness and muscle aches, I kept going back online searching to make sure that the severity of my symptoms, while uncommon, were not totally unheard of with this new vaccine. According to my partner Douglas, few days later when they extubated me ( took the breathing tube out), that I stopped breathing and that they had to manually bag me and do sternal rubs to get me breathing on my own again.

In fact, just like with most chronic asthmatics, with the exception of frequent outpatient and lab type medical visits, most of my asthma care is self-care and administered at home. And just like many others here, I spend the majority of my asthma time in rehab mode. It’s just that when I get sick (meaning my asthma flares up severely ), and I end up in the hospital, the treatment is usually more technical and more complicated. So while it might seem that Im endlessly suffering from debilitating and life threatening asthma flares, I’m actually living pretty much way most people do, only on a shorter leash and with some terrible asthma sprinkled into the mix.

After a couple visits with the specialist and several diagnostic tests, including a pelvic CT scan and Cystoscopy, performed during this morning’s appointment, we finally know the reason behind the mysterious microscopic blood in the urine. Crazy as it sounds, just like with the scarring of my upper airway from multiple intubations with a breathing tube, almost the same exact thing happened in my urethra, only this time it was caused from the repeated insertions of Foley catheters. BTW, the reason for the frequent foley catheter insertions, is that anytime you’re intubated and placed on a ventilator ( at least at UCSF), they automatically insert a urinary catheter into your bladder so that your urine output can be closely monitored. There probably wont be any long term consequences of having a little bit of scar tissue in my urethra, but the same cant be said with the scar tissue in my throat, vocal cords and small airways.

If I needed to be intubated in the future for my asthma (which I undoubtedly will), it would be difficult to get a normal adult size breathing tube in without causing even more damage. It’s also more difficult to breath and cough through a smaller breathing tube, and its more difficult to pass a suction catheter through one as well. Obviously, performing a surgical procedure like a tracheostomy in the middle of a bad asthma flare isn’t ideal. If I had “normal” asthma I wouldn’t have to worry about this, because the vast majority of people who suffered from asthma never need intubated for it.