Jailbreak! I'm home from the hospital

Good news this morning - my vitals are stable and I've come home from the hospital. I still feel pretty much like a rag doll but at least I'm a rag doll with no temp, good 02 sat, normal BP and heart rate and clear lungs. And on Saturday night most of those things were not true so big progress on the health front!

One of my brother-in-laws has a nice phrase that goes something like "as long as you're upright and breathing, you're having a pretty good day." It gives a nice perspective when you start getting spun up about things like job stress, financial stress, etc. If you've got the basics of life working for you the other stuff is probably going to be ok and you shouldn't let it create too much anxiety.

And then you have a couple of days where you're not doing either of those things real well - neither sitting up nor breathing. And you think, "wow, this is pretty simple stuff that I'm not doing that well. I'm getting pretty close to the bottom of the totem pole of things that humans should be able to do without trying. Hmm..."

So, happy to be upright and breathing. My big workout this morning was 5 (count 'em 5!) full laps of the 2nd floor of the Flatirons hospital. And for extra credit I climbed the stairs once (hill workout!).  I immediately then had to go back and take a nap. So some serious recharging of the metabolic batteries are still required, I think.

Incidentally, more good news on the bronchoscopy front. Still nothing back from the cultures so it looks more and more like I didn't have a pathogen. There are still a few things that could come out after the cultures have grown another couple of days but these can all be treated with oral antibiotics so that diagnosis would not require another hospital stay.

Day 33 - big goal now is to get strong for dose 10 on Monday. In honor of the TdF I'm thinking of each chemo session as a stage. Certainly this last stage has had several "above category" climbs. A la Andy Schleck, my chain definitely came off a couple of times during this last 9 days of medical hill climbing but I'm feeling like I cleared the summit and will now gain speed flying downhill to Monday (hopefully NOT like Jens Voight!)