Fifty !

Last thursday 14th April I turned 50.
Having battled for nearly six years to get to fifty, I must say it's a pretty sweet achievement. My goal is now to make sixty. :)

My actual birth day was not really celebrated, I worked a pretty hard day in the workshop building a complex front exhaust pipe for a turbo-charged Mazda RX7. My blood counts are still off the map and te resulting fatigue means I can only work hard for about twenty seconds before I need to rest for around the same amount of time. Hack-sawing through 3" pipe took forever.

I also found that my welding skills have taken a tumble due to the prednisone making my hands shake so badly. In the end I found that if I fired up my new Tig welder and used two hands to hold the torch I could go over the top of the ugly welds and smooth them out.
Where there's a will, there's a way!
The customer was very pleased with the result so that was good.

The other job I had in was V8 powered Ford Escort that I have had a lot to do with since it was first built in the late 1980's. The owner wants to get the car to a point that it can be used on the road and my job was to try and silence the extremely loud exhaust enough that it would pass the 95db noise limit.

This is what I came up with..



 I went for a sort of "Maserati" look by bringing the twin pipes together in the middle rather than out by the rear guards. The sound is awesome! The little SVO Ford V8 just sings at the slightest touch of the throttle. I can't wait to see it back on the race track and road again.



Anyway I digress..  So my 50th birthday was fairly much an average day but I did get a lot of pleasure out of still being able to design and fabricate this type of thing even though my body is completely wrung out. As I say to the customers... "it's better than sitting, watching Daytime TV on the couch"!
At the end of the day I am stuck with what I've been dealt.. lung disease, macrocytic anemia, a steroid trashed body, resting heart-rate of 110+ and no muscle tone at all, it all having wasted away due to the steroid increase. But I actually feel well so that means I tend to just plough on and do stuff regardless.

My 50th Birthday Party however was  a blast!. We had a good turn-out despite the weather and it rocked on from it's start at 4pm until the last bod fell out the door at around midnight. At one point there was around eight people in the spa pool, one or two having just stripped to their underwear and jumped in after rising to the dare!
About 40-50 people dropped in throughout the evening. It was really great to see everyone and I must make a special mention of the effort my buddy Murray O'Neil made in providing a good quantity of champagne and becoming the impromptu toast-master to see the occasion off on the right foot.

Healthwise my haemoglobin count is still stuck at 95, so no energy and no improvement there. The doctors have gone with the "Scanlan protocol" and I am now taking 800mg of Erythromycin (I chose the dosage) daily and so far it seems to be working. However it won't be until I lower the prednisone dose to around 20mg daily that we see if the BOOP is able to be held in check. I'll reach the 20mg target in two weeks. From there I think we should stay at that level for quite some time just to make sure we don't move too quickly and blow the whole thing with a relapse.
Apparently they had a meeting to discuss my treatment idea, could see no reason not to go with it and are very keen to see if it works as no other studies have been done since the first and only Japanese trial in 1995, which is of course the one I used to justify my treatment plan.

I'm now officially a Type 2 diabetic, another side effect of prednisone. I have a little electronic meter that tests and records my blood sugar levels. I have a pen that pricks my finger and then the meter reads the level from the blood sample. I do this about six times a day. I'll do it less as I see patterns appearing and as I get use to modifying my eating habits (less sugar and carbs) to keep the reading under ten. My highest reading so far has been 23.3! and that's with medication. So who knows how high it's been when I've been on 60mg of pred!. 

I've set myself a new goal.. Get my health level back to where it was six months ago. To think that back then I thought I was in bad shape! To be able to get to the top of boulder hill again in 30 minutes with only a little bit of puffing would be great! At the moment I can just manage to walk to the top of our drive. Tim my step-son has modified my mountain bike to fit on a stand so I can gently build up some leg strength. I'll also do some work with some very light weights too to build up my arms.

I'll let you know how I get on...  would be much easier if I had some red blood cells. I wonder if wishful thinking will grow some.?