Adventures in breathing

According to the chest x-rays that were done on Randy he had bronchopneumonia. Despite the pneumonia he signed himself out of the hospital late yesterday afternoon. I don't know at this point how that is going to affect his health. I am doing all that I can for him, but as I've explained to him, if he has pneumonia, he needs to continue with antibiotics. Another problem that he had when he went into the doctor's office on Wednesday was low blood pressure. Come to find out, all of the medicines that he is supposed to be taking for his CHF lower blood pressure. With the exception of a few isolated incidences, he does not suffer from high blood pressure to begin with.

Today we went for his disability evaluation. That took about 1/2 hour. The doctor that examined him for this appointment mentioned that he sounded congested on the left side. I'm sure he was picking up the pneumonia. I have no idea how long we will have to wait to find out more from Social Security. Because Randy was in the hospital on Thursday and Friday, and because it was so crazy at work those two days I never had a chance to contact the Cardiologists office to find out if they had forwarded his files to Social Security. I wish we had some portable oxygen that we could have taken with us for the appointment today. Randy did ok, he just had to move very slowly and not overexert himself. As soon as we got home he hooked himself back up to the oxygen. He's been on it ever since, only taking it off to eat or walk to the bathroom. He sleeps under oxygen and I hope he has a better night tonight than he did last night.

While he was still in the hospital, one of his nurses asked us if he had ever been checked for sleep apnea. I have long suspected that he has it, in part because of the way he snores. She stated that he should be checked for sleep apnea because she suspected that he has it. When he was asleep and she came in to the room to check his vitals she observed that he had episodes of not breathing, each episode lasted approximately 30 seconds she said. Of course the only way to verify this is with a sleep study, and at this point a study is just not feasible.