Bronchial spasms

It's been quite some time since my asthma has affected my life. Often I forget I have it. I know that sounds strange, but I typically have no symptoms unless I'm sick. Last week I started coughing and had a bit of congestion. I gave the workshop with a nice husky voice, and made it through by drinking lots of tea and sucking on cough drops. The cough was still more or less under control. By Friday I was coughing regularly and having a hard time stopping a coughing fit, basically starting to lose control of my breathing. So I put the plan my doctor and I had created when I can't control my coughing into action and started a supportive inhaler (prescription standing by).

I coughed all weekend. And Monday. On Tuesday it was so bad I had coworkers coming up to me and offering me cough drops. These coworkers sit several cubes away, but my coughing was so constant it was worrying them (and probably disturbing their work). Awesome. I even had cough drops. They just weren't helping. Not. At. All. Neither was the supportive inhaler, obviously. What's worse, the coughing was waking me up at night so I couldn't even sleep. I had to use my emergency inhaler a couple of times because the coughing spasm wouldn't stop. I hate my albuterol inhaler...it makes me shake. I basically vibrate for a good hour after using it. At 3am that kind of prevents me from getting back to sleep. Not to mention taking legible notes when you're vibrating is really really hard. And I was coughing so hard it hurt.

So off to the doctor I went on Wednesday afternoon. She confirmed that I was having an asthma-related bronchial spasm. Basically there's no bronchial infection, but my body doesn't realize that so it keeps trying to cough, which irritates my lungs, which perpetuates the whole cycle. The joys of cough-variant asthma. I'm now armed with a medley of medications to stop the coughing, including a stronger supportive inhaler and a short course of steroids.

Let's hope it works so I can get some good sleep. Not to mention I'm tired of tea and cough drops.

Workshop lessons

With all the change going on at work, I've been so flustered, flummoxed, mildly frustrated, and frazzled that I've been distracted. Between the stress and anxiety of wondering what's going to happen and how it's all going to turn out, I've lost sight of why I do what I do. It took teaching the SCCTP Integrating Resources Cataloging workshop for OHIONET this past Thursday to remind me of that important fact. I remembered why I work in libraries:

I love cataloging.

Really. I know for many of you, that means my sanity is questionable. But I really do love it. The often convoluted rules, the idiosyncrasies, even the idiotic aspects, I love all of it. It makes sense in my brain in a very weird way. Teaching other people about how to catalog something reminded me how much I enjoy cataloging.

While I hope the workshop attendees learned something, what I took away I think was equally as valuable. The reminder couldn't have come at a better time. I really needed it.