situations

You learn to adapt to the situations you are in and it's the same with poor health, my decline has not been a rapid decline it is progressive and slow, so slow you don't see it happening and you slowly adapt to the things you can and can't do, like walking for instance - when I would go shopping I'd walk to a certain amount until i needed to sit down but I'd make up excuses to sit down such as 'my feet are hurting' 'I've got a text/I need to send a text' little things that enabled me to sit down and get my breath back and make others totally oblivious to the fact that I was indeed struggling. But there comes a point when you need to accept that you are indeed having a tough time and you do need some help even though you don't want to believe it. In May this year I was told I'd need to use some oxygen whilst walking as my saturation's would drop dangerously low and make my heart need to work harder and cause strain on my heart (an added problem I could do without) but at the time I refused to accept that I would need oxygen and I went home with it but never with the intension of using it. I carried on doing the things I did before, using the same excuses and getting away with it, it was only in August when I came in for 10 days intra-veinous antibiotics which turnout out to be a 3 month stay in hospital on oxygen 24/7 and still with the hope that my saturation's would indeed go up and I'd carry on as before, but this never came and I have had to learn to accept that I do indeed need oxygen to help me live my life and carry on doing the things I enjoy doing without the struggle. October came and I had planned a big evening out with my mum for her Birthday, we were going to go out for an expensive dinner in London and then out to watch a show and I had every intension of walking in and out of the restaurant and into the theatre but as time grew closer to the event itself the physios gently suggested to me that it would indeed be an idea to look into getting a wheelchair and use this to take to the theatre - again i found it very hard to accept this as I would be relying on someone else to take me out and lose what independence I had, it took a while to get my head around the idea of using these things to make my life easier but I now have chose to accept it and I do get upset about it and I hate the fact that I can not just nip to the shops randomly as I did before but my wheelchair and my oxygen are my tools to help me get around and continue to live my life as best as I can.

I never think of myself as 'ill' this is because I know no different, it's only when someone from the outside asks me questions about my health and I begin to tell them such things as my daily regime that I realise this is quite bad. I was telling a woman today about CF and she asked if i took medication and I said yes, I take 12 with meals, antibiotics, nebulised antibiotics, physiotherapy, inhalers, various other nebulisers and so on and she said 'oh my god' and I just thought to myself gosh to someone who has never done anything like that in their whole life it must sound like an awful lot to take on but when you have done it your entire life you don't think twice.