What a Lousy Couple of Nights

The past two nights have been quite lousy.  My health has been so lousy that I needed to use epinephrine during the night last night.  

During my previous bouts of COVID, my doctors have assumed that COVID is causing an undesired response in my primary illness.  It causes inflammation which causes a response by my mast cells.  I already have a life threatening issue with inflammation and mast cells so anything that exasperates this is not a good thing.  So, in response, I need to throw medications at both problems.  

I awoke in the middle of the night after only an hour or two of sleep both last night and the night before last.  I was having difficulty breathing both nights.  This was clearly a case of needing to clear out my lungs because, as I would do some coughing and huffing, I could get a little bit of phlegm to come up and that always seemed to help my breathing enough to be able to get back to sleep.

Last night, however, regardless of some phlegm coming up from my lungs, I was still feeling as though I needed the help of an inhaler so I also used my Albuterol.  That didn't really help though.  This was most noticeable last night.  Huffing continued to provide some relief but it was difficult to clear my lungs.  

Eventually, I started noticing sparkles in my eyes even though the room was completely dark.  I know that this, along with narrowing vision, is a sign of anaphylaxis beginning.  I had never seen this present itself in complete darkness before though so that was a bit of a surprise.  Now that I identified an anaphylaxic episode beginning, I grabbed the epinephrine too and used that.  I got up and took some emergency H1 blockers too.  

I don't know why but, within a few minutes, I had a far easier time clearing my lungs of phlegm.  It seemed that now just a small bit of huffing would clear out a good chunk of phlegm.  Within about 10-15 minutes, I was breathing far easier again.  Unfortunately, now I was a bit jittery from the epinephrine so falling back asleep wasn't going to happen anytime soon.  I had to wait for the epinephrine to wear off a bit.

I continued to huff up more stuff clearing my lungs even more as I read so that was good and it was far easier to do.  I eventually went back to sleep.  

Although I have been exhausted and fighting overwhelming fatigue with COVID lately, I definitely need to get back into breathing exercises that help to clear the lungs.  I'll definitely be doing that again starting this morning.  

Right now I'm thinking that COVID has caused inflammation in my lungs...  my already overactive mast cells respond to that inflammation...  degranulation of the mast cells happens in my lungs...  this causes breathing problems and anaphylaxis.  

Having great difficulty breathing is no fun whatsoever but I'm happy to have found some relief in the wee hours of the morning this morning.