With all that's gone before, my motives never felt so pure

So the respiratory physiotherapy I've been having is definitely having a positive effect. They're not miracle workers and they have commented that my lung function is particularly low, but at least it's a stable low and not getting worse, but that they can work to make the most out of what lung function I do have. I've already mentioned that they've given me a nebuliser to break up the stuff in my lungs that I can't normally cough up. Well last week they gave me another wee tool to hopefully open up my airways a bit more too, which should help me get the best out of my lungs. It''s actually a relatively simple little tool called a flutter which consists of a pipe which you blow down a tube into a chamber which contains a small plastic cradle for a ball bearing. Now when you blow into the tube the ball bearing lifts and then bumps off the roof and settles into it's cradle agaiin and this repeats again and again giving it the fluttering effect of the name.

With a little bit of practice you can get it to flutter at about 15Hz (15 times a second) which is apparently optimum for opening the airways because it resonates with the bronchi in some way I'm not entirely sure I completely understand but it's something to do with a positive pressure being created. It's obviously (along with the nebuliser) having a bit of an effect as I've felt I can breathe much easier in these last few weeks than I can honestly remember. 

I've even been out to the pub last Saturday night when my best friend was home from America, and quite a few other people I didn't really expect to see were out, which was just fantastic. One slightly dramatic side to that night out was that I was having such a good time that I barely noticed the passing of time and my liquid oxygen actually ran out. When the cylinder empties it doesn't do so in a linear manner, by which I mean when it's still half full that doesn't mean you've got the same length of time left that you've used up already. This is because when the cylinder starts to empty there is a greater space above the liquid for it to evaporate into so it can quite rapidly go from what appears to be half empty to completely empty. Thankfully one of my friends Lynn is pregnant so she could give me a run home in the car, which was most fortunate as it would have been an hour or so for a taxi. That said that episode did show that I can go for about an hour without oxygen and there aren't too many ill effects except for feeling exhausted the next day but that would have been the case anyway.

Seeing so many people on that night out and having a lot more visitors over the last few weeks or so has been absolutely great. It's far from a normal life but it's a new kind of normal for me and that makes it much easier to live with.