Sunday, October 26, 2008

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly



I have been paying a ton more attention to my breathing and what impacts it. Surprisingly enough going camping, even in cold weather, doesn’t seem to have any negative impact at all! Even with the thinner air! I went camping with my family and then again as a scout master with the scouts the last two weekends as nightly temperatures dipped down into the 30’s. Amazingly I really had no problem. Even with smoke from the fire, and being at 8,000 Feet! I was really pleasantly surprised. Actually the cool air seemed to help. I don’t know if there are any medical benefits of this… e.g. if it really “Helped” anything, but it didn’t seem to make anything worse.

On the flip side it seems that talking vigorously for long periods of time, or breathing hard due to physical exertion such as walking variously tends to inflame my breathing problem. However this hasn’t proven to be too much of a problem, as long as I pace myself and take things easy. Strangely enough I have found that any time I walk around Wal-mart, any Wal-mart, I find it hard to breathe before I get half way into the store. I have no idea why this is, but at least for me it is very apparent. I don’t know if it is perhaps some of the dust in the air, maybe some of the chemicals from the plastics they use or something. I have no idea, but Wal-mart get’s me every time! Go figure that one out.

The other thing that has really stood out is the consistent and extremely vivid bad dreams / nightmares which I believe are being cased as a prednisone side effect. Many times I wake up at 5:00 AM or so with the most insanely vivid dreams. I have occasionally had dreams in the past (before the prednisone) that were much worse than this. None of the recent dreams are terrible, but they are all very, and I mean very vivid and all have some calamity, disaster or crazy thing happening. If this gets to be much more of an issue for me I think I will adjust my sleep schedule to get up a bit earlier and see if that does anything.

Other than that, things are going fairly well. Just keeping up the fight and hoping to see more improvements in my next set of x-rays. I really want to get off of the prednisone as soon as I can.

Michael

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Mike,

Just found your blog. It seems that you have pretty much same condition as I have. I'm from Finland and have a blog as well. It is in Finnish so it does not have much usage for you. Here is address anyhow: http://sarkkishomer.blogspot.com/
I'm on 15mg and just had my 2 years anniversary on sarcoidosis and first anniversary on prednisolon. I have done a lot of excercise to keep my body in good shale. ONly 6 kilos extra so far.
I future I might write something in english as well.

Cheers, Homer

Anonymous said...

I've been reading here . . . Just a note on the breathing bit; I've got problems regularly from Sarc as well; but Wal-Mart almost kills me. It even affects my wife, and she doesn't normally have that problem. Weird; we haven't figured it out either.

Good luck on your taper!
Jeff