childlike wonder is the vibe for the summer, amelia said so~ 💖

I can neither confirm nor deny lol

yeah I'm still kind of weak but it's so nice being able to breathe!

I am! I got discharged yesterday, along with a ton of stuff to take care of the tracheostomy, we're working on getting me scheduled for a bronchoscopy next week and then I have an appointment with the ENT surgeon on the 13th!

no, and from the sounds of it, i won't be going home until Wednesday, and I still haven't heard anything from the ENT about the next steps

yeah if it hadn't been for these really amazing ER nurses here at Banner, the doctors down there wouldn't have even listened to me, it's thanks to them that ENT and pulmonology got involved and they're who we're working with now thankfully

yeah today has been a lot of "hurry up and wait" for more information so I'm guessing I'll be here overnight again 🙄

yeah I do feel that way, but it's a safer option because they'll have big problems if something goes wrong and the tracheostomy collapses and leaves them unable to reestablish my airway during the dilation because it wasn't healed enough from the surgery yesterday

yeah they gave me a temporary airway with the tracheostomy and were planning on doing the dilation surgery today but now they're thinking they might just send me home with the tracheostomy and then have it heal for a little bit and come back for the dilation in 5-7 days

yeah until then I just wait and not do too much! it just sucks because even walking around takes a ton of effort and I have to constantly stop and take breaks just to breathe 😑

I have an appointment with a specialist at the hospital where Alyssa works on April 29th, so not until then, that was the earliest they could get me in (originally she didn't have an opening until the end of June)

so usually they do surgery to widen that area, but how invasive/complicated the surgery is depends on how bad the narrowing is! mine is grade 2 currently, at around 55-60%, so that's not too bad but it's also kind of like i'm breathing through a straw lol

it's a rare condition where your trachea is narrower than the rest of the airway, usually from a build up of scar tissue there. apparently it frequently gets misdiagnosed as asthma because your breathing is noisy and you're out of breath a lot. so I've probably had it for years without knowing!

well my sinuses are actually fine, it turns out I didn't have polyps and I might not even have asthma!! I have this thing called subglottic stenosis 😅 and the earliest a specialist could get me in is the end of April so now I'm just waiting around

yeah the asthma is 100% not helping and the cause of the heart stuff I'm sure, plus a lot of asthma meds make your heart speed up, so it's just a precaution, hopefully I'll be cleared for any potential surgery to get this thing out because I'm over it lol