Come play my game I'll test ya

I knew there was something I forgot to share with you. Counter-intuitive as it may seem the transplant team at Newcastle decided to decrease the amount of oxygen I'm on. Now that may sound ridiculous for someone who can barely breathe at all without extra oxygen. It would be straightforward to think that increasing my oxygen flow would improve my oxygen saturation in my blood, and it does.

What comes as quite a shock though is that oxygen can actually poison you.

The level of oxygen being forced into my lungs through my concentrator wasn't allowing what we'll call exhaust gases to get out, leading to a build up of CO2 in my lungs and arteries.

I get checked all the time to see what my oxygen saturations are and on a good day with my oxygen on they can reach the heady heights of 95% which is damn close to normal. Remove the oxygen and within a single minute they'll plummet to about 84% without even moving. Even those of you not terribly good at maths can spot that's not good.

What very rarely get checked are all your blood gases and I'm incredibly thankful for it because it requires arterial blood to be taken. Getting blood out of veins barely even hurts and that's only because of the tiny little pin prick from the needle itself. Getting blood out of arteries is totally different because arteries are positively brimming with nerve endings, thus making plunging a piece of surgical steel through them a rather painful process. I have one reliable artery on my left wrist that I can point doctors directly at so they're not rooting around, which is an unbelievably painful but sometimes difficult to avoid effect of this procedure. Before I found this particular old faithful artery of mine I had a few rather botched attempts at finding the equivalent artery on my right wrist which I'll just say did not go well.

The exertion tests I talked about in my last post I performed under the new lower level of oxygen and I have to admit I surprised myself. Even a few days of the amended therapy might have helped my lung function. I've to get my blood gases taken again in a week or so and hopefully that'll confirm that there's less CO2 hanging around making a nuisance of itself.