Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Recovery Investigated, Back to Harefield Hospital

It seems that I may have spoken too soon!
We attended the Transplant Clinic at Harefields on Monday 21.3.11 and was happy to meet up with two twitter friends at lunch time one was @LamLungArtist  (Justine Laymond) who had dropped in for a while. She was telling me about her latest venture.
She is training for the Clipper round the world race.She is going to do the last leg (8) which sails from USA, Canada, Europe, Ireland and back to the UK. This involves,4,000 miles, 22 days at sea, with 4 races in total. If you want to know more check out her blog http://www.justinedoublelungs.blogspot.com/ I noticed that she also had a piece in the Harefields Transplant club news letter.
I also met up with another lung transplantee @AwoogaBurbs (Richard Burbedge) he was transplanted back in June and under went a new procedure. The new minimally invasive lung transplantation differs from established lung transplantation because it doesn’t require surgeons to cut through the sternum to open the entire chest. Rather, the organs are replaced through incisions at the side of the rib cage, vastly reducing scarring and dramatically improving patients’ recovery times. You can read more here
He has had a good recovery and has been able to start to go swimming again recently, something that I hope I will be able to do soon.It was great to talk about how they were doing and I was encouraged listening to how long it had taken to reach their improvements as I felt that I should have been doing better by now, but with my CO2 problems I have been slowed down in my recovery.

It seems that I was to have a few more investigations before I would be sure things were better for me.I was seen by the Doctor in the afternoon who dropped a bit of a bombshell.  He was concerned that my lung function was less and that I had gained weight since my last appointment.He wanted to admit me for tests!
I had noticed the weight increase but felt that my lung function was generally good but hadn't improved since my last clinic appointment. I didn't feel unwell and was quite fed up with the thought of admission.
I resigned  myself that it would be useful to find out how things were in my lungs and that a Bronchoscopy ,Biopsy and CT scan would give the doctors a chance to investigate properly.
So I will be getting admitted to Harefields Hospital tomorrow and hope that the tests that I have done will be able to show that things are progressing well with my transplant recovery I hope that I will be able to go home on Friday if the test show no problems:)

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Thank You :-)