Ludlow's Place - The Latest Shtuff

I am constantly forgetting to put this in reverse order. If it seems it's been awhile since it's been updated, please scroll down to see if I messed up again :)

5-10-02

A Diagnosis!
Hard to believe, I know, but after 15 months of hell, last week's CT scan of my lungs has resulted in a diagnosis. It shows that I have something called bronchiectosis. The way they explained it is that the tiny air sacs in my lungs are not expelling fluid and infection. So I'm off the Combivent inhaler and started on a nebulizer today with two new medications, a new pill, and something called a flutter valve. It's an odd looking little contraption that I exhale into and it causes a fluttering in my chest that will break up the mucus, you can figure out the rest on your own. And if that doesn't appear to be working quick enough I think I will try out an absolutely disgusting home remedy suggested by Bernadette. If all goes well I should be feeling much better in about two months. If you, for some unknown reason, have no clue what I am talking about, click here to read the whole cough saga, which I will finally update and hopefully be able to END soon.

Also, I will be posting the new and greatly improved genealogy pages soon. I have already secured space at Rootsweb and have over 600 names entered into my program. It won't be much longer now. So, as you can see, there are some advantages to being sick for so long :)

5-6-02

The Darcey Chronicles
(That's a sad attempt at a joke there Darcey)
For the occasional straggler who doesn't know our life story, Darcey and I have been friends since our Jr. High days in California. I went on to live in Texas, and she chose to have a life in Maryland, (or Mary-land, as Craig calls it), where she is the executive director of the Queen Anne's County Arts Council. Darcey was here for 3 days with her wonderful little companions, Poochini and Cookie. We got to be tourists to a small extent, (which was very cool if you have kept up with my health problems). We did the standard walk around Indian Springs Park and the Waco Suspension Bridge in downtown Waco. They'll kick you out of the city if you don't do that, ya know. From there we went to the Dr. Pepper museum. It's expanded quite a bit since the last time I was there, and yes, it is interesting. They have a working soda fountain too, so we got to have old fashioned floats, and they also do soda the old fashioned way, where they mix the syrup and soda-water by hand. Then of course we had to hit a couple of our favorite stores, Mike's and The Paper Bear. The next day we went to Homestead Heritage, which sells itself as an Amish sort of community. It seemed to me that when we were living in Ohio the Amish people had no electricity and traveled by horse & buggy, these people are quite modern when it comes to some of those things. They do have a blacksmith shop and that sort of thing, and use some old fashioned techniques, so I suppose that is what is implied. It's a nice place to visit though and they do make some beautiful furniture and handcrafts. Expensive (worth it I'm sure) and beautiful. Then on to the mall. I know that at one time there was a store out there that featured work by local artists, but it doesn't seem that anywhere in this town does that anymore, or they are hiding it quite well. We could find plenty of prints in gaudy frames but nothing original anywhere. We didn't make it to the art museum at Baylor, so please don't bite my head off for saying that we could find nothing. We were working around school schedules and days of the week. Not to mention procrastination... mine, my kids... In my own defense, I haven't been out of the house in so long that I had forgotten how. There was also time spent in the backyard and just sitting around talking, which was the best part. After she left I ran a couple of searches and came across these sites. The first one is our Jr. High School, Dartmouth Middle School, and our High School, Leigh High School.

So I hate the idea of speaking too soon but the newest inhaler enabled me to get out while Darcey was here. I had laryngitis the whole time from the Flovent inhaler,which is an inhaled steroid, so I had to go off of it. Also the Singulair was having no effect so I was taken off of that. After 2 days without the Flovent I started on Advair, which is a dry powder inhaler containing Flovent and a bronchodilator, so far so good, and I can talk again. I'm going to take advantage while I can and hope that it's still working in another 2 weeks.