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Mysterious shortness of breath: What has helped you?
Lung Health | Last Active: 13 hours ago | Replies (3347)Comment receiving replies
I have been very honest with the docs. I told them I drank an average of 1.5 glasses of wine a night and every now and then two but that I also didn't have any wine some nights. I told them about the smoke inhalation four years ago, but you know ER docs, they just want to get your stabilized and move on to the next patient. We'll see what happens. Just talked to a friend and she wondered if my sodium and electrolytes got out of whack in all this. A couple weeks ago I felt like I was going to die I felt so badly and took a cab to the ER where they kept me in the hospital overnight because my sodium was so low (127 when normal is at least 136). They told me to pick up some Gatorade when they released me. It's a puzzle--a maze, trying to get through this. One thing leads to another and you get locked in this vortex of health problems that relate to each other and there seems to be no way out to get back to your former self. We all keep trying though.
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Now @catmom777 Listen to what you are saying about "no way" to get back to normal. You don't want that to come true do you? Of course not, so stop saying it. Terri is absolutely right about the powers of the mind and what a patient can do for themselves by advocating for their health, taking all the steps you can to get there, and believing you can do it. There is medicine in that.... good medicine. You do become what you believe. I have. I am on here trying to help patients learn how to do all this and how to face their fears and achieve their health goals. I wasn't this person before my life taught me these lessons. If you keep telling yourself that your health will fail and you expect to die, what do you think you are doing to your health by believing that? You have to take control of your thoughts, and in doing this, you take control of your health. No one can do this for you, and you have to want to get well. When people decide to die, their health fails and eventually they do. When people decide they want to live their fullest most positive life, it gives them energy to make that happen.
There is a lot you can control about the environment you live in, the healthy or unhealthy food you eat, the risks you take, the people who's opinions you listen to, and what you believe. I saw my aunt do this with cancer years ago. After receiving what should have been a fatal dose of chemotherapy from a medical mistake, she recovered from that and even had to learn how to walk again because of the nerve damage it caused. Her cancer had spread throughout her body. She could have easily given up. She was able to enjoy the rest of her life because she believed she could beat cancer, and she did for a long time. It should have taken her life in a year or two, and she lived ten years past that. She could have given up and decided that her life wasn't worth living, but she looked for ways to be positive. She had been a nurse and a school teacher, and was a kind, caring person. She'd lost her first husband to failing health, and then she married again to a friend they had known for years as a couple. I made her wedding cake. She did all of that living while she had cancer because she wanted to live, and live well.