Dear Diary: I Can't Easily Breathe Today

With a little effort from my body movements I would go breathless and I can also notice that when I am eating as if I am drowning. I remember when before I first went into my first dialysis where I was so waterlogged that whenever I drink a little liquid I felt that I was like drowning. Maybe it was just a stroke of luck during that time that I was also severely anemic and I had to go for a multiple blood transfusions.

Now what the transfusions did was it accelerated my kidney damage because I was not given a diuretic while being transfused with blood. So the added volume in my system conked my kidneys to a halt. The resulting edema saved my lungs because body fluids didn't go to my lungs but to my body only like in my torso, limbs feet, and face. The feeling of drowning went gone but after a few days I would require a dialysis because the signs of the kidney failure was evident already after the blood transfusion.

I haven't had any issue with a difficulty in breathing even at the time that I was in the first years of dialysis. Maybe because of my height that it contributed for my capacity to hold water in my body. Now it is clear to me that my backbone collapse was the culprit of my difficulty in breathing and not the fluids in my lungs.

I also remember when in the first years that my backbone is collapsing, I had this feeling that is like I am being squeezed as I walk or just sit around. Now that feeling is quite magnified a lot, it is because I had gone considerably so shorter for my stature that my lungs just can't get much air in them. I was standing 5'6" before and my mother's height is about 4'11" and now I am shorter than her. You can just imaging how squeezed my lungs are.

Now I am just feeling a relief when I lay down flat. And you cannot lay down flat or be comfortable with it if you have fluids in your lungs. So my conclusion is that my breathlessness is due to the fact that I am slowly being garroted by my own backbone.

That is one of my worries really, not being able to breath while you are aware of it all happening. This is the reason why maybe I had survived this long, because I just exhausted every possible ways for me to evade dying. But I really do not fear death, I welcome it. But I am just so spineless enough not to walk the road leading to it.