Monday is going to be fun… a morning appointment at the hospital to undergo a “methacholine challenge.” The latest effort to try to figure out what the deal with my lungs is to have me breathe in increasing doses of methacholine, a chemical that will, if you have asthma, cause your lungs to go bugnuts. So with any luck (ha!), it’ll be a boring time masked up like a third rate Bane. More likely, it’ll be some fun times feeling my lungs curl up and die. Wheeeeee.
UPDATE: Home at last. The testing was unpleasant, but not as bad as expected. In short, you breathe in increasing doses of a substance that makes your lungs rebel. If you have asthma, the effects will appear soon; if you don’t have asthma, the effects will still show up, just later and lesser. And as it turns out… my lungs actually performed somewhat *better* at the initial low concentrations than during the baseline. If your lung function drops 20%, you have asthma. Mine, at the end with the highest concentration, dropped 5%. So… no asthma. Good news, I suppose, in that that’s one illness I don’t have, but I’m back to wondering what causes the susceptibility to bronchitis.
The high concentration stuff was just plain uncomfortable, but my lungs worked through it.
The worst part of the day was getting stuck in Salt Lake City rush hour traffic. Gah. Granted, had this been my commute back when I lived in California, I would have thought it a good day… but I’ve spent ten years in rural Utah where a traffic jam is a thirty-second delay caused by a tractor in the road you have to pass before you can get back to your 80 mph cruising speed.