QUIT Smoking!

NATIONAL QUIT SMOKING WEBSITES

American Legacy Foundation – Raises awareness of the toll tobacco has taken upon women and encourages women to seek help to quit smoking.

American Lung Association – Hosts Freedom from Smoking Online, a step-by-step quit smoking program based on the successful group classes. Now you can receive help 24 hours a day in the comfort of your own home at no charge!

CDC Office on Smoking and Health-How to Quit – Federal government site with links to quit smoking resources. Also maintains complete information and publications on tobacco health effects, research and Surgeon General's reports.

The QuitNet – offers smokers an on-line support community, forums moderated by counselors, and individually tailored advice to help them kick their nicotine addiction. http://www.quitnet.org Smokefree.gov -- offers science-driven tools, information, and support that have been effective in helping smokers quit.

Your smoking hurts MY lungs!
Secondhand smoke comes from two places: smoke breathed out by the person who smokes, and smoke from the end of a burning cigarette. Secondhand smoke causes or exacerbates a wide range of adverse health effects, including cancer, respiratory infections, and asthma.
There are many chemicals in secondhand smoke which act as irritants to the respiratory tract or which cause cancer. Secondhand smoke exposure can cause exacerbations (flare-ups) of breathing problems among those with reactive airway disease, asthma and other chronic lung diseases. Longer-term exposure to secondhand smoke can lead to lung cancer and heart disease.

More facts:

• Secondhand smoke contains over 4,000 chemicals; 200 are poisons; 63 cause cancer. Secondhand smoke has been classified by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as a known cause of cancer in humans (Group A carcinogen).
• Secondhand smoke causes lung cancer and other health problems. The EPA estimates that secondhand smoke causes approximately 3,000 lung cancer deaths and 37,000 heart disease deaths in nonsmokers each year.
• Secondhand smoke is especially harmful to young children. EPA estimates that secondhand smoke
is responsible for between 150,000 and 300,000 lower respiratory tract infections in infants and children under 18 months of age annually, resulting in between 7,500 and 15,000 hospitalizations each year.
• Secondhand smoke is harmful to children with asthma. The EPA estimates that for between 200,000 and one million asthmatic children, exposure to secondhand smoke worsens their condition.
• Secondhand smoke can make healthy children less than 18 months of age sick; it can cause pneumonia, ear infections, bronchitis, coughing, wheezing and increased mucus production. According to the EPA, secondhand smoke can lead to the buildup of fluid in the middle ear, the most common cause of hospitalization of children for an operation.
• Secondhand smoke is harmful to adults with asthma and other respiratory conditions, and can provoke exacerbations of these diseases. According to the National Asthma Education and Prevention Program, “Asthma patients should not smoke or be exposed to environmental tobacco smoke. Tobacco smoke is the most important environmental indoor irritant and is a major precipitant of asthma symptoms in children and adults.”
From the American Lung Association

More Prednisone

I have been up since 4 am today and have already cleaned out the debris under the shrubs in my back yard. Where does this manic energy come from and when will I just drop in my tracks! This is not a typical pattern of behavior for me.
Which gets me back to an earlier question - what is "me?" The me on prednisone? Effexor? On will power?
I keep morphing into other versions of Pattee - so which one is Pattee? All of them? This is too circular for so early in the day!

A hot hot day - already 91 with more humidity than my shower. I have lived here in the Baltimore area for 16 years and have not acclimated to this climate. I do love the growing season. Long and showy. I remember trying to garden in Syracuse and it was always a struggle to get lush and extravagant blooms, thick stands of flowers. And spring was always a crap shoot. So I did not do much with bulbs. Here my spring is a riot of color, solid blooms like a rainbow. Every day is like Christmas, going outside to see what has come up today. What a gift!

It is a bad ozone day again. So indoors for the rest of the day for me. I am trying to get used to checking air quality daily now. Something I completely took for granted - breathing - has become a focus now. I find that my lungs start to strain if I am out too long, I get the deep pain as I inhale. Hard not to notice. But a month ago I was recovering from a lung biopsy and struggling to breathe. Today I am out weeding, raking, lifting and lugging - enormous changes.

Prednisone and other modern drugs...

I am into my third week on high-dose prednisone and so far, I haven't had any noticeable side effects, but the word noticeable must be noted! All sorts of havoc may be being unleashed inside me where I cannot see it or feel it - yet. And who knows what tangos and cha-cha-chas it is doing with all of the other wonder drugs I take so that I don't have to loose weight (high blood pressure), diet (cholesterol), exercise, be suicidal (depression), reflux, get infections, and whatever else can be directed my way. Mostly I try to just not think about it.

It would make me crazy to sit here and combine all the potential side effects of all the meds and all their combinations-Yikes! But I can breathe today - and actually do some physical activity too. What a change from a month ago - when taking a shower was an epic journey for me.

Back to Prednisone. It is in a class of medications called corticosteroids. I am taking it because of the sarcoidosis, the inflammation part of the disease. My lungs are inflamed which causes the fibroids and scaring, lack of breath, painful breathing, exhaustion. The prednisone is working in place of the T cells that should have knocked out the inflammation. My immune system messed up, so I have sarcoidosis, take prednisone, and now am open to any infection in my vicinity.

The list of medications and supplements that you should tell your doctor about before starting Prednisone is unbelievable. This drug must interact with just about everything. And since I take a lot of just about everything, I should be more worried than I am.

Then the side effects. This is where I parted ways with all of the literature on this drug and others in my medicine cabinet. Along with 2 dozen or so of the more usual side effects, none of which are heartening except maybe for "inappropriate happiness," there are the real scary side effects, including cancer (for which it is also sometimes used as a treatment?).

I am grateful that I can breathe again and get through my day with relative ease, but at what cost? The damages that accompany Prednisone are daunting. And I am grateful that I can get through my days without overwhelming hopelessness and despair - but what are the anti-depressants moving around in my brain? Will I find out in 10 years that it all shorts out?

There is uncertainty piled on top of an alp of uncertainties today. It is frightening to realize the absolute limits of what I know, and the solar systems of what I do not. How can decisions be made? Is there any right answer anymore? It depends!

Old Things

I was thinking about Bakelite today - it reminds me a lot of my aunts, kitchens, being a child in the 1950s. I realize that it was first produced in the early 1900s but the jewelry did not come out until the 1930s, just in time for my aunts to purchase bakelite pins and earrings. It was also used for radios, telephones, kitchen appliances, and other more prosaic goods which we had around the house.

But it is the bangles that I love. No two are ever alike. Some are so creamy and smooth in color it is like staring into a churn of butter. Others are clear and within, you can see tiny universes, speckles and dots, tails of comets.

The one thing Bakelite is NOT - subtle! The bangles can be a third of the forearm wide and even the thinner ones attract attention with their perfectly held roundedness.

Bakelite, makes me thing of World War 2, aprons, dancing at the Aragon Ballroom, floral housedresses, permanent waves, formica tables, chunky heels and patent leather - a mundane glamour accessible to everyone. No diamonds for me - make it Bakelite!

Where to?

I would love to just go away, now. Go somewhere - maybe mountains with a creekside. A cabin. No one nearby, just me. Trees. Birds. Sunshine. Ferns, moss, wildflowers. Some boulders. 76 degrees and low humidity. Rain after midnight and a thunderstorm or two late afternoons, somedays. A view of miles, valleys, other mountain tops; clouds. Must be I am in a Camelot mood - without all the pomp and intrigue!

I am feeling tired of being me right now. I want to shed my skin and be a tabula rosa. Right now I am a farrago of beings, all too many, and none functioning very well. I am weary of being a mother, and one who is manque, at best right now. I want too much and I give too much and I expect too much. The rewards, rewards? are few and inconsistent. So, abandon children!

I am weary of being 58. Let's try 35 again, but a different 35 then the one I already lived.

And working. Maybe I should learn the mandolin; turn my violin into a fiddle and work my way across the land playing for food to eat, playing for fun and delight.

Where did the herbalist go? My herb farm, apocathary, recipes, soothing blends?

Can I erase yesterday? Can I be just me, a neophyte, an acolyte to my reincarnation?

No birth family with all the abuse, terror, pain. Sex at age seven. Beatings, beratings, endless supplications without a cessation of the life I was in. No family - demanding and selfish to the end. Hating me, jealous of me, wanting me to fix things, do the right things, be better than, more than, take care of, care of, care of...and the hatred festering away even unto death. And still, wanting me to take care of what is left.

No pregnancy at 20. No rushing to find any way to escape the nightmares of family going right to the edge of a cliff. Not being able to jump off - to say NO! I cannot do this. I do not know anything. Not a baby - not yet. Such fear, a husband and a baby. Marriage, what did that mean? Was I safe? Was I loved? Who was that girl who had such high expectations of love, of being cherished, the princess life?

Babies, poverty, coming in second, third, moving where my husband went, no choice, dead ends everywhere I looked. Wisconsin, Ohio, New York, alien landscapes littered with landmines. Marriage, never immutable except in its ability to stun, to turn me upside down. There I sat, wanting, wanting, never enough, never good enough, never smart enough, never pretty, let alone pretty enough. Homebound. And after a while, no longer a wife. An "ex." Ex what? Can skin be shed with such rapidity?

And then only part of a mother. What was left after I became an "ex." What was a mother anyway? Not valued, for one thing. Alone, for another. The isolation of it all was galactic. My mantra, don't be like your mother and everything will be OK. I would say that in my sleep; I will say that in my grave.

And here, at 58, the mantra fails me.

Sarcoidosis

So that's my diagnosis - after all the tests and surgery - sarcoidosis. What is it I asked?
Well, according to the NIH:
Sarcoidosis (sar"koi-do'sis) involves inflammation that produces tiny lumps of cells in various organs in your body. The lumps are called granulomas (gran"u-lo'mahs) because they look like grains of sugar or sand. They are very small and can be seen only with a microscope.

These tiny granulomas can grow and clump together, making many large and small groups of lumps. If many granulomas form in an organ, they can affect how the organ works. This can cause symptoms of sarcoidosis.
Sarcoidosis can occur in almost any part of your body, although it usually affects some organs more than others. It usually starts in one of two places:
1. Lungs
2. Lymph nodes, especially the lymph nodes in your chest cavity.
The National Library of Medicine has a really neat interactive video that describes this disease, plain and simple:

Air Disease - Lung Disease

The data presented here are from the AMERICAN LUNG ASSOCIATION
Metropolitan Areas Most Polluted by Short-term Particle Pollution (24-Hour PM2.5)
2007 Rank 1 Metropolitan Statistical Areas
1 Los Angeles-Long Beach-Riverside, CA
2 Pittsburgh-New Castle, PA
3 Fresno-Madera, CA
4 Bakersfield, CA
5 Logan, UT-ID
6 Birmingham-Hoover-Cullman, AL
7 Salt Lake City-Ogden-Clearfield, UT
8 Detroit-Warren-Flint, MI
9 Eugene-Springfield, OR
10 Cleveland-Akron-Elyria, OH
11 Washington-Baltimore-Northern Virginia, DC-MD-VA-WV
12 Sacramento--Arden-Arcade--Truckee, CA-NV
13 Chicago-Naperville-Michigan City, IL-IN-WI
14 Harrisburg-Carlisle-Lebanon, PA
15 San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland, CA

What is Lung Disease Data: 2006?
The American LUNG ASSOCIATION has depicted salient facts and figures about some of the most commonlung diseases in America today.
The American Lung Association strongly believes that if cigarette smoking, preventable premature childbirth, disregard for workers’ safety, and violating clean-air laws were to end today, we could expect a future largely free of the most lethal forms of lung disease.

WOW
• Every year over 349,000 Americans die from lung disease – an age-adjusted death rate of 121.4 per 100,000.
• Lung disease is America’s number three killer (after heart disease and cancer), responsible for one in seven deaths.
• The lung disease death rate has been continuously increasing while death rates due to heart disease and cancer have been declining.
• Overall, various forms of lung disease and breathing problems constitute the number one killer of babies under the age of one year, accounting for 21 percent of infant deaths in 2002.
• More than 35 million Americans have chronic lung diseases.
• An estimated 440,000 Americans die each year from diseases directly related to cigarette smoking, including heart and lung diseases.
• Millions of children and adults with lung disease in this country are exposed to levels of ozone and particle air pollution that could potentially make them sick.
• Asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (emphysema and chronic bronchitis),the most common obstructive lung diseases, are associated with substantial health impairment and work disability. Nearly one in five cases of both diminished general health and depression can be attributed to obstructive lung disease.
• Lung disease costs the American economy $81.6 billion in direct healthcare expenditures every year, plus indirect costs of $76.2 billion – a total of more than $157.8 billion.

Old Friends

Old friends,
Old friends
Sat on their park bench
Like bookends.
A newspaper blown though the grass
Falls on the round toes
Of the high shoes
Of the old friends.
paul simon

Lately I have been hearing from many of my "old friends;" those special people who were an important and treasured part of my life for a while. Then one of us would move away. But they forever remain in my heart. What a pleasure it is to hear a voice on the phone and when she says "Hi Pattee, It's Carol," I immediately know which one, of all the many Carols I have met, she is. She is my old dear friend Carol! And we start talking as if we just saw each other for lunch over the weekend.

I think about how special these people are to me, regardless of how much time has passed between us. They remember and knew a Pattee that is a facet of who I am today, and I just love being reminded of the Pattee that they knew. They are my memory keepers, as I am theirs.

Old friends are one of the many wonderful blessings of this life. So thank you Carol, Pat, Jeanine, Barbara, Nancy, Diane, Herb, Kathee, Anna, Melissa, Theresa, Linda, Kathy, Howard, John, Kim, for the ties that bind - for reminding me of special blessings.

BABY BOYS

My daughter Kate told us last week that she and Ed are having a baby BOY! A minor surprise in a family characterized by the significant number of females vs males. I have 2 daughters, 2 nieces, 2 grand daughters...and now, a boy ?

According to a recent story (April 18, 2007) on MSNBCNews.Com:

Mother Nature has always ensured that male births outnumber female ones, but the gap has been gradually narrowing over the past three decades in the U.S. and Japan, according to a new study.

Researchers suspect the decline in male births can be explained, at least in part, by paternal exposure to environmental toxins, such as certain pesticides, heavy metals, solvents or dioxins — chemical byproducts produced during incineration or the manufacture of other chemicals. In the U.S., the proportion of boys dropped from 105.5 per 100 girls in 1970 to 104.6 in 2001; in Japan, the male-to-female ratio dropped from 106.3 boys for every 100 girls to just fewer than 105 per 100.

So our Kate (and her Ed) is doing what she can to buck this trend!

If you are pregnant, MSNBCNews.Com provides this brief and Interactiv graphic of the stages of fetal life.

LUNG SOUNDS, Pet Sounds

Lung Crackles

So what do lungs sound like??? I don't think I spent much time on this one before. But there is a wonderful site at UCDavis that plays lung sounds for our edification and entertainment and for educational purposes as well I suppose. I listened to the "crackles" sounds - crackles, grackles, grook...
What are crackles? Crackles, AKA rales, are the sounds the lungs make when there is excessive fluid in the airways. This is one of my symptoms, hence, the interest.

Here is a sampling of some of my favorites:

• 
  normal tracheobronchial sounds
  just normal vesicular sounds
  normal bronchovesicular sounds
  fine crackles
  fine late-inspiratory crackles
  medium crackles
• coarse crackles

My Lungs - Your Lungs