Catch up...

My health has been a real problem the last few months. Energy levels have ranged between extreme fatigue and just plain exhausted. The blood transfusion I had three weeks ago has done it's dash and my levels are now almost as low as they were. But I'm not the sort of person to let that affect my day to day life so I have just plodded on with my work and taken things as they come.. if not a fair bit slower than usual.

I diagnosed relapsed BOOP a couple of months back and wanted to go for the full 60mg for four weeks treatment but the doctors didn't like that idea (even though it's the gold standard for relapsed BOOP).
They wanted me to reduce down to 20mg by next week when I see the respiratory clinic (another new doctor). I never made it past 30mg.

I've been running a fever morning and night for the last week and have now developed a cough in the last couple of days. My heart rate is still very high and I get dizzy if I stand up too fast.

In my last post I mentioned that I planned to ask the respiratory doctor if I could try the antibiotic Erythromycin as a means of treating my BOOP and weening off prednisone. My haematologist has no objections and has left it up to the respiratory doctor to give the OK. I'll find out next Thursday when I see him.

Now interesting thing... back in September last year I developed a cough and was put on an antibiotic for a week for fear that it could develop into pneumonia with my weakened immune system. The cough cleared up overnight and yet the lab test results showed no infection in my sputum. My GP was at a loss to explain how an antibiotic would have resolved the problem if there were no nasties there in the first place. It sure confused me too!  I was reading back through my health notes this morning and guess what that antibiotic was? You guessed it Erythromycin!

So armed with that bit of knowledge I managed to grab five minutes with my #2GP Kyra late on Friday afternoon and she prescribed me a seven day course.  Standard dose is 1600mg a day for infection. For BOOP it's 10mg per Kg of body weight. So I'll be cutting the pills in half and taking around 600-800mg a day until next week and monitoring the results.

Because I've been running a fever for the last week it will become immediately obvious if it's working or not. If the fever doesn't go away then I can crank up the dose and treat it as an infection.
(I don't want to start on a high dose because that may affect the efficacy of the drug at the lower dose.)

On March 20th the Wellington Car Club held it's annual Hillclimb on Alexander road. It's one of my favorite events and I hold the record for the fastest car to the top of the hill. On the Saturday night before hand I was woken by my heart pounding erratically in my chest. I was having my first ever episode of atrial fibrillation (erratic heart rhythm). I put on my sports heart-rate monitor and it was unable to get a fixed reading, it swung wildly from 150-226 beats per minute and by the pounding in my chest it probably wasn't doing too bad a job at getting the readings right.

I had two options... wait and see if it settled, or call an ambulance. I decided to wait. Within half an hour I'd drifted off to sleep again and awoke at 7am still alive and ready to race.
Once we got to Mount Victoria and unpacked all the gear ready to race I introduced myself to the ambulance officer from St Johns, who generously offer their services at all our events, and he suggested that he hook me up and perform an ECG on me to be safe.

My resting heart-rate was 156 but it had a normal "sinus rhythm" so we decided to keep an eye on it through the day and if any problems arose he would take me to hospital. Interestingly my heart rate never moved once I was in the car. It was only walking around that increased it. I guess I was more relaxed behind the wheel  :)  Had it increased significantly while racing I would have retired for the day for safety's sake.
Below is video of one of my runs. It's looks very smooth from this perspective. Top speed would have been around 170kph as it was a marshalls run (where we take the helpers for a run up the hill) and I was driving slightly slower than I would during competition.




I won the event, which was good. My time was .2 second slower than my best time, but that's OK it's still a fairly consistent time and shows I'm not getting any slower. However the competition is getting faster, with some competitors postings some incredibly fast times. I said at prize giving that they were certainly snapping at my heals. It might be time to retire the Evo and get back into the middle of the feild where all the fun and true competition lays.

To that end I'm pouring my efforts into getting my old AE86 Corolla race car (above) put back together.. sort of a 50th birthday present to myself.

I'll post an update on my health in a couple of days... right now my fatigue levels are huge.. I can't even walk around the supermarket without having to rest all the time... eventually going back to the car and laying down.

I've got two big exhaust jobs on this week.. it's going to be interesting getting them done with no energy!.

...Ron