Posted by John O. on 3/19/2008, 10:33 pm
69.129.197.8

I saved some stuff from Wes over the years that I'd like to share. Somehow I don't think he'd mind. I invite others to do so too. Here's one from 2003: I live in a pot of luck. My numbers are lousy but I bet they have been lousy all my life to some degree. I had pneumonia 4 times that I can recount and my parents told me it was five times before I was 22 and somehow as I grew up, my body may have compensated for all the lung damage. Even if it's not so, I like to think it is as it encourages me to keep going forward. I led a very active life, played a lot of sports, spent 25 years in the infantry, jumped out of airplanes, helped raise 5 kids, all that good stuff despite my bad lungs which were being smoked on the whole damn time. Despite that and an FEV1 of 1.05 I don't take a lot of meds--Serevent twice a day and Combivent occasionally--maybe 3 puffs total during the day. 02 too of course. I didn't start that way. I had one doctor, my first Pulmo started me on Flovent 110. Later the doctor who had overall responsibility for rehab said he usually starts people at the Flovent 220 level and suggested any time I wanted it he'd script it for me. I almost took him up on it at the time. I was brand new to this game and figured it worked real well so why not. About two weeks later, my internist, a good guy, took me off all Flovent saying I should avoid steroids unless I really needed them. He didn't say it but I believe that rehab guy looked upon all of us as beyond all hope of anything and his theory was, "give 'em all the drugs they want so I don't have to mess with them." My Pulmo here, the guy who fell when that balcony collapsed, is much more conservative with all this stuff and I am delighted with that attitude. He let me have control of the Avelox, my antibiotic of choice for lung infections, but not prednisone. He has only scripted me for pred once over the two years we have been here and that was for 10 days. 60 mg for 3 days, 40 for 3 days and 20 for 4 days. I had no sides at all. Why do doctors script a daily dose of prednisone for a year or more? Are they saying the adrenals are shot and don't work at all? I sure agree that we need medicines but I want to take the absolute minimum. From what so many posters on the forum say about the terrible side effects of that stuff, I wonder why we rely on it so much?

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