liralen | Rewards

So... went to my allergy and asthma doctor today for my check up and to see where I was after three months of meds, allergy shots, and trying a new exercise regimen. After the first two months of finding myself at 61% and 63% after meds, it had kind of woken me up to the possibility that I was losing lung capacity permanently. And the prospect of permanently losing a third of my lung capacity was... a bit much for me to deal with.

I even set up a reward for not just setting up, but going to my appointment. Peaches.

Peaches mark the end of summer, for me. And they (in this case the Western Slope Colorado Peaches, which can be picked ripe because they travel a very short distance to my house), along with the local sweet corn roasted over fire, are the epitome of summer food for me. The local high school band and the cross country racing team were both selling 18 pound boxes of Palisade peaches as fund raisers, and the growers actually bring them in their special crates (which cheerfully speak of the boxes being loaded in the shade of the fruit bearing trees) themselves.

Peaches... I think it's because of loving T.S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock for most of my adult life that I adore peaches. They touch on my hedonistic side when they're really, really ripe, when the perfume of it calls me, and the velvet skin slips so easily off the globe of rampant golden juicy sweet soft flesh...

Ahem.

Peaches. Really ripe peaches. There's a reason they're the fruit of immortality in Chinese myth.

We're sharing one box with the neighbors, another whole box is coming in a couple of weeks, so I'm reveling in them and trying new things with them. We've been eating them the last couple of days, but John and I hit the Cheese Importers today and I thought I'd gild the lily rather ostentatiously, so I bought an eight ounce tub of Italian mascarpone.

After dinner, I sliced two of the ripe peaches in half, dabbed on a bit of melted butter, and then grilled them outside on the grill, cut side down. When they were good and marked and starting to soften, I turned them over, added a teaspoon of mascarpone and a sprinkle of cinnamon and just a dash of nutmeg. When the mascarpone melted just a bit, I took them off the grill, set them on desert dishes, and then drizzled the tupelo honey I'd found in Florida all over them.

Yeah. Gilding the lily with pure gold.

It was worth it. It was astonishingly rich, sweet, ripe, and sinfully luscious. Warm and soft, the fruit tartness offsetting the center coolness of the creamy richness of the mascarpone. Just a touch of spice playing with all the other flavors and the nutty brown caramel tones of the butter grilled with the sugars of the fruit itself.

So.

Yeah.

The appointment went well. Far better than I'd hoped.

I'd been hoping to get, maybe 10% of my lung capacity back. I hadn't hoped for much more than that, as the doc had originally prescribed the medications to see if things would open up, and I'd only gotten 3% back then.

This time, with the steady exercise, I got back 15%. So I'm now at 78%, which is over the three-quarters threshold for when he was worried about my losing too much lung capacity to stay active enough to keep on top of my asthma. I'm now "functional".

I'm still supposed to stay on the everyday meds, and in the checkup in six months, he's hoping for a little more back or, at least, nothing worse. John came with me to ask some questions he had.

So it turns out that the progressive thing that my friend died of is an entirely different beast. Saying that I have pulmonary fibrosis is like saying I have a rash. The rash being from an allergic reaction from poison ivy or the rash being the result of a flesh-eating bacteria, it's still a rash. My friend had something that was causing the stiffening and scarring in his lungs on a continual basis. I do not. So little to no likelihood of dying in the next couple of decades of this. Which pretty much made my day.

I just need to stay on my meds, do my allergy shots, probably up the doses in October, and make sure I get my exercise.

So plenty to do...

From there, I dropped John off at the OUR center so he could work. I then parked at the library and got some "Learn Chinese" kits, and dropped them in my car. From there I walked to get an iced latte, a refilled ink cartridge for our printer, and a bottle of my favorite rosemary and mint hair conditioner from the Aveda store on Main. It was just a three or four block walk, and it felt pretty good. And I was going slowly enough to help a guy in a wheelchair get into a shop he wanted to get into, to say hi to people that smiled back, and just enjoy the small town feeling of being in downtown Longmont.

From there I hit the recycle center, the post office to send another box of anime and manga back to

amberley, and right when I was pulling into the parking lot of the OUR center, John called me. Hee. So I picked him up down the alley and we hit the Pumphouse for lunch and met up with ex-coworkers who were still pretty compressed from the recent layoff. We let him vent, and enjoyed our lunches.

A couple *more* errands, including the Cheese Importers, and then we were home. An hour later we were at the bus stop to get Jet with 23 other kids that were on the bus. Last year, we were lucky to see four or five kids on the bus, but this year there were 23 this morning. Yeesh. I guess gas prices are getting to people. Plus the school is another whole mile away...

Jet and I played Okami until dinner. John made carnitas tacos, and after dinner we had my "experiment" that turned out quite well. Then I got a few minutes to write, and now I need to get Jet into bed...

So it's been a very good day. Thanks to everyone who has given me support on the lung thing in the last couple of months. I appreciated it all very, very much. Now I think I have a much better idea of what I can do, what's going on and what's NOT going on. So I think I feel much better now.

Thanks.

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From:

imladra.livejournal.com

I'm glad to hear things went better than you thought. That is always, always an important thing when it comes to health.

And though I'm allergic to fruit, those peaches sound mighty tasty!

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