This Week in Chapel Hill

It has been another sort of wet week here in Chapel Hill. Not a lot of rain but several overcast days and lots of high humidity.

And we noticed yesterday that there are lots of trees and flowers blooming now. Hope that we will not see any hard freezes so that they can finish their cycle unharmed!! Unfortunately, that means that the Spring pollen season has started. Not good news for folks like me with breathing problems. Heat with high humidity and pollen are the worst things I have to cope with.

We had clinic visits two days this week so my rehab/exercise schedule has suffered. Had to get several tests done including one new one that had not been done before and several follow up tests (labs, breathing test, blood gases, that sort of thing). We also met with another of the pulmonary transplant doctors and two of the transplant surgeons. Dr. Hartwig looks so young but I imagine he must be older than he looks. Dr. Reddy looked more of the age you sort of expect, but he is not that old either. But maybe being young is a good thing for this? Liked both of the surgeons. Managed to get explanations for several things Charley and I had questions about.

Did find out that my weight is the one thing standing in my way of getting listed for a transplant. I now weigh 92/93 which is 10 pounds more than when I started my rehab in early January. According to Dr. Reddy my ideal weight would be 125. BUT we don’t think they are going to expect me to gain that much. As a matter of fact they have promised to provide me with a target weight to shoot for between now and my next series of follow up clinic visits. We should get this information by the end of next week, after their committee meets on Tuesday.

Some great news, one of the ladies I was in rehab with during January and February got listed about two weeks ago and she has already had her surgery to get her new lungs and is already coming back to exercise!! She looks great and seems to be doing very well. I love these success stories! It sort of settles my fear about going through such major surgery and the recovery process.

Charley and I have been talking about how to handle our fur babies when the time comes for my surgery. We will be away for whatever length of time I am hospitalized and that is an unknown. It varies with each patient. We are thinking about finding a good facility where we can board them, rather than asking our kids to come and get them and take them back to SC. The fur babies, especially Cheyenne, would be much happier with this plan since she is so attached to us. Sadie would probably go with the flow on whatever we decide to do.

If anyone out there in blog land has ever used a pet facility in the Durham/Chapel Hill area that you were happy with, or had bad experiences with any of them, please let us know. We want to make sure that our fur babies will be well taken care of while we are away. And yes, we know we have plenty of time to address this but it never hurts to plan early. This way maybe we can try them out ahead of time.

Well, that is our update for this week. Almost wrote a novel today, huh?

Thanks for stopping by!!