CF Happens

Sometimes in life CF (Cystic Fibrosis) happens…pun intended

recent posts

  • Accepting a new baseline

    Accepting a new baseline is never easy.  What does a new baseline mean you ask?  Well a baseline is your “normal.”  It is where you are at when you are feeling good and at your best.  Everyone’s baseline is different.  In the world of CF a baseline refers to where your lung functions are and how you are feeling in correlation with those numbers.  With CF your lung functions go down over time since CF is a progressive disease.  When I say over time I mean it is not an over night thing.  Although you can have an exacerbation that seems to make a drastic change over night.

    My lung functions have slowly gone down over the years with plateaus (baseline) along the way.  I hit a plateau and stay there for a while, which is considered a baseline, then another series of exacerbations can knock my numbers down.  When they get knocked down sometimes I am not able to get back to where I was, thus I hit a new plateau/baseline.  The same cycle continues throughout life.  I have always said that it is a good thing that CF is a slow progressing disease (for the most part) because if I woke up with 40% lung function after being at 80% the day before I would be a little upset.  Not to mention I would not be able to breathe.  With CF being slow you have time to adapt to the lower lung function.
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  • Moving on up

    Moving (as in packing up your things and moving to another house) when you have CF is not the easiest thing to accomplish.  When you are in the military and get new orders the military relocates you.  They send a moving company to pack all your things and they load it all onto a truck and move it to where you are moving.  Then when you get to the new location then unload the truck and will even unpack the boxes if you would like.  With that said, when you move to a new place during your assignment it is on your own man power.  We rented an apartment when we relocated to Tennessee last July because we didn’t know the area or how the market was here.  After being in the apartment a short while we realized that we needed to move into a house, whether it was renting or buying.  We started the search at the beginning of February and put a contract on a house at the end of February.  We closed on the house on April 1st.  We had to pack ourselves and move it all from the 2nd floor apartment.  Well we could have paid for a moving company but I am cheap and stubborn. haha  We moved things throughout the week and moved all the big stuff on Saturday with the help of my husband’s co-workers.  That meant that “she-woman Shannon” had to show up and get things done.  My husband took off one day to get some things moved and one of my friends helped load things into the truck which was a great help.  I was flying solo the other 2 days. (more…)