marsh willowherb revisited: ripe capsule .. (click to enlarge ..)
“you can live 100 years with only one leg”
the pulmonologist told me 3 weeks ago
i got the message
i’m working out
yes, … that willowherb …
somewhere,
deep inside my lungs,
it looks like that
Picture by bvdb (whoisbert) august 2015 – @home – Nikon D3300 – x_DSC_2973
who is bert 
Bert,
I must not have been reading your post closely in recent months, or at least not the commnents.
I’m sorry for your health struggles and I hope your doctors are able to resolve what is clearly a serious health issue.
I have asthma but it is exercise-induced and started some years ago when I was a very active distance runner. With my current health issues I don’t know when I will be able to run again because my pain, especially in my leg, makes it difficult for me to walk.
I am sending you positive energy to help keep your health improvements stable and for your doctors to find the answers to restore you fully.
I love this image, Bert – reminds me of my dressage days and braiding horse manes! Aloha.
Well, it looks from the comments, like the roller coaster is starting to flatten out for you. That’s good to hear. Best wishes to you.
thank you … i’m starting to notice all these little details of the conditions, that were ‘inexistant’ for me 6 months ago, but probably present. It seems that what helped me for decades, and stopped because of a stupid foot injury which took a year to complety (90%) heal, is still working today.
However, I should next time think about other exercises that also involve deep breathing in and out for about an hour, without having to use those precious legs …
We don’t appreciate our legs enough! My son broke his leg badly last year and we learned the same thing. We’re very grateful that it healed well and he’s been able to go back to some of the less taxing martial arts that he used to do. I’m much more thankful for my own legs now, and my health in general. I hope you find a “legless” alternative exercise. My friend says that swimming helps her lungs (she has a problem with breathlessness) despite the chlorine. Is it something you have tried?
well, the legs are opk right now, so as an exercise i walk the 32 steps in our house 40 times in a row, and sometimes more, or sometimes less, giving me a pint of air extra since the past 3 weeks. (i didn’t start 40 times, i just did 10 the first day)
I’m not a great swimmer, but I have muscles in my arms, so i could do what monkeys do in the zoo on our ceiling — it sounds crazy, but I could actually do that 🙂 with some modification.
It took me a minute to work out what those monkeys would do on your ceiling but I get it now. 😀 Good idea.
… well, they seem to defy gravity most of the time, if there is anything to grasp … 🙂 LoL 🙂
😀
I’m very happy to hear that your son is back in his normal doing.
Will gentle exercise help the condition Bert?
.. gentle exercise does not work ..
it started to deteriorate summer last year, got a little better in November, to collapse to a bad situation in February. since then I’ve kept a diary.
Something completely unexpected happened the 24th of august: a pulmonologist prescribed a set of 3 different medicines, which I took for 2.5 days, to feel after 60 hours as if i had taken no medicine at all.
So I phoned and later went to my physician and he agreed to put me back to the old symbicort at 2×3 puffs to recover from that strange anomaly of a non working ‘nexthaler’.
the diary i kept has been useful to eliminate what has not caused the asthma boost:
it was not the dog, not winter, not food, barely the weather, and not my weight, as i had lost 8 kg in as many months …
then i noticed that things went much better while in austria, and deteriorated again in just 2 weeks. yes, we always think it is the air, but is it?
then i thought about the ‘silent railways’, that had gone since november 2014 … i always had to run to be in time, or to catch a train. but since about 10 months now, the classrooms are far away from public transport and only reachable by car.
teaching is a gentle exercise. i always stand or walk, do a block for inspiration a couple of times a day … but it’s not enough.
back to now:
so after 5 days of 3×2 to escape from dead, i started doing stairs. in the end that’s what i did in austria too (although not real stairs of course): sometimes climbing 500 metres or more in a day.
climbing stairs: I started august 31 with 20×6.1m and i have been increasing this ever since. (yes, i used trigonometry to calculate the height of the entire 32 steps, and also calculated the error on this measurement to be 1cm. the google in my head can be manic about these things) and yesterday i climbed the empire state building, 372m, for the third time in the house.
And this works.
I switched to
2×2 september 6 and
2×1 september 10.
2×1 is the original dose that I had been taking from march 2003, till february 2015. After that, this dose had become insufficient. (in fact 2×3 was insufficient too)
The withdrawal effect from 2×2 to 2×1 puffs has been hard a couple of days, but this is now past.
I ordered and received some private ‘breathing’-meters to measure what is happening while doing this ‘solo-flight’ without the medical staff issuing their orders.
I’m back to ‘normal’ with a measured peak flow of 500liters/min, which is slightly less than a healthy forester my age, but better than most smokers.
in the past 16 days, i did my exercise 12 times.
serious exercise opens the airways, because the body has to, in order to get enough oxygen. Of course, I have to listen to my body while doing that, and if my heart goes too fast i have to rest. if my foot hurts, i don’t exercise. today i didn’t because i have a healthy stomach upset after eating prawns yesterday.
somewhere around this weekend I’ll go to my physician to do a simple check, and discuss what happened.
I feel ‘normal’ again, now since a couple of days, still too early to talk about a success, but by the end of this month, i will feel confident enough to talk about it.
Good news. I too do steps every day – the stairs in my house – and then out on the nearby nature reserves if the weather permits. Steps are great for cardio-vascular health, and don’t impact the hip joints like level walking does, or at least, not to the same extent. Forester? You smoke?
i don’t smoke — i used to say that alternatively, i could do the job of an ecological forester in stead of being busy with clusters of servers …
I hope you do find a success.
it looks good … let’s wait and see
Lovely
thank you, Jane 🙂
Very interesting photo
thank you, 🙂
You’re welcome