October 24, 2011

Tuesday's clinic (before my brief admission) brought me a warning of what was to come, one of the first sentences out of the resident's mouth was "What status are you?" to which I responded status one-- not really giving it much thought because "status" has been a flitting topic all summer long, with most agreeing that status 1 was still suitable for me.

Next thing I knew, the resident returned with my doctor and we were discussing my 'status' with a new sense of focus-- no longer flitting. The doctor came up with an interesting analogy to illustrate her point: she said to picture my declining lung function as a slow descent into a pool. As you first ease into a pool you can still breath and the drops don't matter so much. However, when you're chin deep in the water, each drop, each tiny drop in lung function matters, and it takes just a tiny step more to drown you-- you just never know when that tiny step is going to be. Hence, the moral of the story is when you're chin deep in the water, it's really not the time to play chicken. 


I walked away with this cutesy analogy to consider over the next "one to two weeks" (my unofficial deadline for the IVs to do their magic). However on Friday, the day before I was discharged, the Big Boss Doc paid me a visit...

It seemed an oddly casual conversation to have, and she didn't give me a whole lot of room to backpedal (which, frankly, is the kind of firmness I need). She said, "I spoke to Dr. S after clinic on Tuesday about changing your status and I agree with her. So I'm going to send off the e-mail to Toronto General tonight unless you're really freaked out..."

I considered the freak out/on hold option momentarily, then slowly worked out connecting the dots with her before I finally agreed. The fact is I haven't required IVs as often in the past (usually going 8 months, not 5 months) and it seems I'm not really that stable when I'm off them. To be honest, I probably never really cleared that infection from the winter, since I've been just buying time with Cipro all summer. I've also maxed out on the benefits I'm going to get from exercise, so any hopes of being that 1% that works themselves off the transplant list is dashed. I'm stronger than I was, so I at least have that. And lastly, I'm tiny, and tiny people wait longer for lungs (though they don't like to explicitly say that, it's true...) so why sit on the back burner?

So here I am at Status 2 (official status 2-ness to be confirmed at my next clinic appointment), which makes transplant a little more 'real'.