Happy First Friday…of September. Labor Day has come and gone and even though I didn’t have a lot on my calendar for the week, it has flown by.

The Great Hunter surprised me by saying he’d go with me to the Fiber Arts Festival at the Daniel Boone Home. That is such a nice park with historic buildings and bonus, I got over 5,000 steps in.

We got a chance to spend some time with our youngest and his wife on Labor Day and spent several hours at Cedar Lake Winery enjoying some good music, good wine (at least for me) and I’d love to say good food, but I’d be lying.

Last month, I saw my electrophysiologist, hematologist and pulmonologist. (So many “ologists”). Good news from the electro–I’m off the Amiodarone I’d been on for a year and a half.

Less good news from the hematologist as my hemoglobin, hematocrit and red blood cells are all elevated again. Last year, she had ordered a JAK-2 blood test to possibly determine the cause of these elevations, but the insurance company denied it. She said at the time that another way to achieve the same results would be through a bone marrow biopsy. I told her at the time I didn’t want to do that (I’d read it was fairly painful. They stick a long needle into your hip bone and extract the marrow).

On this visit, she again suggested I agree to the bone marrow biopsy to determine whether I had a primary issue with the production of red blood cells from bone marrow or if the “polycythemia” (name for the elevated levels) was caused by something else…mainly my (untreated) sleep apnea. I told her I wanted to wait another three months and promised I’d start wearing my MAD (mandibular advancement device) again now that my gum had healed from the tooth extraction.

The Pulmonologist prescribed a “Trelegy” inhaler for my moderate COPD (which I hate saying I have because it most likely comes from smoking for twenty-five years). This inhaler has three different medications, one of which is a corticosteroid, which she said could help reverse the progression the COPD. Unfortunately, one of the side effects of this inhaler is hoarseness which I got. I also got eye twitching. I emailed her telling her of the side effects but she said the possible benefit of using the inhaler outweighed the side effects.

She said she’d never heard of eye twitching as a side effect. So just to see if there was a correleation between the inhaler and the eye twitching, I stopped the inhaler for two days and guess what? The eye twitching went away. So, just to make sure, I’m going to go back to using it and see what happens. I have a long time to work with it as she doesn’t want to see me back for a year.

So that’s where my life has been. We’re going to Branson next week for a couple days and we’re going to board the dogs. It costs an arm and a leg, but we’ll get a chance to be unfettered by fur babies for a few days.