Drat this working for a living all to heck.

So I stumbled across the study below, which seems to find a link between more coffee consumption and less blood pressure:

Self-Reported Coffee Consumption and Central and Peripheral Blood Pressure in the Cohort of the Brisighella Heart Study
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36678184/

I do not, in the part of the study available, know whether or not they made a distinction between decaf coffee and full caffeine coffee, unlike my previous find (https://agoodwinsmith.dreamwidth.org/221318.html) which found caffeine to be beneficial, but I shall continue with my coffee-slurping habits.

So. Remember the bronchoscopy? I was to phone the doctor's office for a follow up appointment in two weeks.

Called. He's away for two weeks, and he is fully booked until October.

So, I told his reception person my woes about trying to call him at the hospital, and then left the whole problem in her lap.

I completely wash my hands of this. I assume (I know) that if something horrible is going on that someone will let me know before it kills me. I suspect I feel this way because I don't really think something lethal is going on.

In the meantime I am wrestling with a small annoyance. For the three mornings after the procedure I am to cough up whatever is in my lung and spit it into a specially prepared receptacle. There is a receptacle for each morning. My problem is two-fold: I don't have very much to cough up, and I was taught very thoroughly not to spit, so getting the very little I've got into the receptacle almost involves a barf reflex. Oh well. I hope I'm getting something more than just saliva into the little tub.

... and I'm losing the fight with the mask.

I've looked at other styles of masks, and I do think the one I have is a very good style and fit. I haven't seen anything better, and certainly nothing I want to spend $200.00 on - even if it is only Canadian dollars.

My issue is that I have something on my face and head, which I hate. I do not wear hats, scarves, hoods, tiaras, headbands, or tinfoil prophylactics. I do not like things on my head. Part of the issue is that I have a big head, so most things are too small and give me a raging cranky headache. The headgear I am using is not tight (great ability to adjust), but that means that the mask leaks air. I can sleep through the sound, but the rapid frequency vibration on my cheek is just a no.

So. I resolutely put it on my face every night, and now I am hardly coming awake to take it off. I still remember (vaguely) taking it off, and I am still justifying it to myself (gonna go pee, gonna blow my nose, gonna do some damn forgotten thing that will justify the removal of the mask) - and then just falling back to sleep. Sometimes I turn the machine off, sometimes I don't. When I reach the point where I have no recollection of removing the mask, then I will be doomed.

I have independent testimony (sleep over with friends at 18) that I am able to get up, walk across the room, turn off someone else's alarm, and go back to bed - and never even pause in my snoring.

So anyway - onward, ever onward. Hah.

So. The lung specialist believes that the things in my lungs are sarcoid tissues. Sarcoidosis is poorly understood - but it ain't cancer, so yay.

They don't know what causes sarcoid tissue, although certain genetic groups are more prone to it. Scandinavian background is one. Well shucks - the Sorgen genes have some downsides, I must say.

While I know that I am reading for the best and merely glancing over the worst, in general sardoidosis can be managed, or at least there are a lot of options to try.

In other news, my valiant attempts to make the CPAP part of my every day life continue. Monday night it won, but I have been gaining ground since then. I'm so tense about it I have a stiff neck. :) It shall get better; I shall persevere.

Through Andrew Ducker's list, I found this:
https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1161/CIRCHEARTFAILURE.119.006799

A meta analysis of previous longitudinal studies. "We investigated the diet domain in FHS (Framingham Heart Study), CHS (Cardiovascular Heart Study), and the ARIC study (Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities) to identify potential lifestyle and behavioral factors associated with coronary heart disease, HF, and stroke."

"Increasing caffeinated coffee consumption was found to be significantly associated with reduced risk of HF .... but not stroke." HF = heart failure

"Decaffeinated coffee consumption was significantly associated with increased risk of HF ..."

"All three studies showed a concordant inverse relationship between caffeine intake in 100-mg doses (1 cup coffee or 2 cups black tea) and risk of HF."

Definition from:

https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/heart-failure/symptoms-causes/syc-20373142

"Heart failure, sometimes known as congestive heart failure, occurs when your heart muscle doesn't pump blood as well as it should. Certain conditions, such as narrowed arteries in your heart (coronary artery disease) or high blood pressure, gradually leave your heart too weak or stiff to fill and pump efficiently."

I had my desensitization today for my next sleep study with the cpap machine.

Since I am a mouth breather at night, I wore the whole mask, and then the flow of air was turned on. It was very weird. It felt like my head was being blown up like a balloon. My ears popped. I fear that air might leak out my ears. We shall see.

So. I had a sleep study to check me for sleep apnea.

I don't think I have this, but in the on-going saga of tests to check out my heart murmur, we've checked everything else, so we might as well check this. Also, it is a slight bit of "oh, obesity, it must be apnea", but not too bad.

(I can't see myself wearing a CPAP because they look like an alien trying to plant an embryo down the throat and I have claustrophobia, but hey.) (Also, I have been sleeping propped up on some pillows for the last 30 years, so if it ain't broke, etc etc.)

The person who looked after me was very kind and competent. The bed was comfy, and I could have as many pillows as I liked. The room was private, and although there were other sleepers there, we never saw each other. Everything was clean and fresh. It was a little claustrophobic because the door was closed and there was no window, but I had taken my fancy air purifier with UV zapper, so the air circulating helped me ignore the closed in aspect of the room.

I had at least six electrodes in my hair on my scalp, a couple on my chin, some on my chest, some on my legs. I had a band around my chest, and a band around my tummy. I had nose things in my nose (normally used to give oxygen, this time used to measure my breaths). I had a sensor taped to a forefinger. And all of these things were tethered individually to monitors beside the bed.

I fell asleep just fine, and slept my first light sleep out just fine. Then I usually wake up just enough to rearrange myself. I could not because of the tethers. I kept getting pulled up in one direction, and then in the other I was ending up on top of all the cords and junction boxes. Also, the pillows were copious - but wrong - so it took me a while to get the pillows into an acceptable configuration. I tend to grind my head into the pillow, so during all this semi-wakefulness the technician had to keep coming in to regum down the electrodes on my scalp. I think I managed to also yank something out in one of my flailing attempts to find a piece of bed not already occupied by medical science.

Eventually I fell asleep again, and had a deeper sleep. And she let me sleep as long as possible - but they kick everybody out by 7:00 am, so I suspect I was coming up out of the very deep dream sleep, but hadn't quite surfaced naturally.

She removed all the bits, and I got dressed and left. My hair was full of seriously sticky and tangled residue, which I couldn't get a comb through. It became crunchy (ew). This mattered because the testing facility is out of town for me, and Mom and I went for breakfast before we went home.

Once I got home and had a proper shower, it did just disolve out of my hair with just warm water - but it sure was gross-tesque.

I was surprised how disturbing I found being tethered during sleep. It was almost clautrophobia. It was definitely aggravating.

However, last night I slept in my own bed, with my own pillows, with my ungummed hair, and my cats rompy-stomping back and forth through the open door, so I slept very well.

Gallbladder. If you can avoid it, don't have one. Yup, that's my advice to you.

I have been experiencing occasional gallbladder attacks since November, and hoping that by just limiting my food to things that didn't provoke attacks, I could wait until we knew what Lorne's schedule of treatment would be so I could fit my issue around them. Nope.

I went to emergency on Saturday afternoon after a Friday night of epic barfing, and the next day with no reduction in pain. I need, obviously, to have my gallbladder out. There was much horsing around in emergency deciding whether it needed to come out pronto the next day, or it could wait a couple weeks. The decision was made by the cowardly surgeon to send me away out of town, for this "very simple, routine operation", which has not made me feel safe. So, now I am off for more tests and more consulting and more medical shit.

This episode happened when Lorne had two tests back to back. The PET/CT scan was in Vancouver on Friday, and he flew back Saturday, then Monday he went to Vernon for a bone scan. They infused him both times with radioactive shit. The second one he had to wait three hours between the infusion and the scan. My mother is exhausted. She drove from Salmon Arm to Kelowna and back on Friday, again on Saturday, and then to Vernon and back twice on Monday - and then she took me to emergency on Saturday, and collected me on Sunday. She's wiped.

I am so exasperated and angry - just from having the gallbladder chose now to be a nonono-two-year-old-toddler-with-a-tantrum.

Also - my tummy hurts. Wah.