This is a hard post for me to write. I’m pausing in the middle of a workday in my sculpture studio. I bent over to pick something up and got winded and thought, “Please God, let me continue to be able to sculpt. I searched for some answers on the internet and came upon this video. They have no answer for where my Interstitial Lung Disease (ILD) is coming. I asked the last doctor, is idiopathic what you call it if you can’t find the reason?” The Fellows answer was, “It never presented itself as idiopathic.” and he proceeded to show me the scans and how different they are from what is in my lungs. I felt hope and relief, and then I went to the doctor this week, and he says he wants to do a lung biopsy and idiopathic is not off the table. I think I heard him say that this can develop into idiopathic. WHAT?
I look back and see what this woman in the below video mentions. How stairs suddenly became harder, and I grew more winded. How quickly will this progress? Will I live for my next birthday? Will I live for more years? Friends around me are talking about retirement, and I’m just wondering will I be searching for a lung transplant as they are entering “retirement?” or will one of these bouts of bronchitis or pneumonia take me out?
This week I feel improvement. Is this temporary? The disease is progressive. After the last bout of pneumonia it took me six months to bounce back, several of those months I could not work. How will I get by?
Trying to trust without expending a lot of energy doing so,
Psuche