Saturday 3 September 2011

..... and breathe........

I finally made it home on Wednesday - yay!

On Tuesday I had a chat with my consultant, it turns out that they'd grown Staph Aureus from my sputum culture. I was not expecting this at all, but it explains why my lungs have acted in a completely different way during this admission. I'm still a little confused though - I didn't feel that I had a chest infection, my sputum definitely didn't look infected, there was nothing of note on my chest x-ray, and I was only spiking low grade pyrexias. A few months back, there were discussions about me potentially having Bronchiectasis. After the CT scan it was decided that the thickening in my lungs wasn't severe enough to diagnose me with Bronchiectasis, however, after this most recent admission, my consultant thinks it's something we might need to look at again.

I've had a course of antibiotics and whacked up to Pred back up to 60mg whilst in hospital, and eventually my lungs started to behave. My consultant hopes that this episode of staph aureus will be a one off so he is reluctant to do anything just yet, I've already had a trial of Azithromycin which didn't appear to have any benefits (but I do seem to have had 2 episodes of chest infections since stopping this trial, and I very rarely get (got?) chest infections so maybe it was making a difference which I can only see now??). So the 'plan' is to wait and see what happens! I seem to do a lot of that!!

Since being home I'm caught in that horrible place of desperately wanting to reduce my Pred as I'm finding the side effects hard to deal with, but at the same time, knowing that I need the Pred to keep these lungs working :(

Anyway, I'm very glad to be home! There is nothing like sleeping in my own bed and having lots of Tommy cuddles and kisses :)