Memory Foam Matress

~~Erin~~ Sophie due July 20th! says:

geeesh…i'm so sorry you're doing through this. tell your stinkin husband to stand UP for you and to tell his mommy that you're a family now. that behavior should be unacceptable. you don't owe her anyything and she needs to STFU and mind her own business! This is your life not hers..

Ron says:

Hi John,First off – emphysema and COPD are the same thing. Emphysema is the defining condition for a diagnosis of COPD. Your meds look a bit on the meagre side, based on what you’re saying. For example, this is what I take And CFS and COPD are totally unrelated – one can’t be confused with the other.You need to talk to your docs about inhaled steroids – oral steroids are best avoided, except in emergencies. In fact, if you haven’t had one, ask for a Pulmonary Function Laboratory assessment, to find out exactly what’s going on, and sort out your meds.Cramp. More likely to be age-related than anything else (and age-related buggeration can set in any time from the 50s on). Magnesium should fix it. 600mg a day until it quietens down, then try reducing to 300mg; if it comes back, stick with 600mg. If magnesium doesn’t work you need to get it looked at as it could be a circulation problem. In fact, get it looked at anyway. And the simplest remedy for foot cramp is getting out of bed and walking around – it stretches the muscles and boosts the circulation.Drugs are not the best solution for getting rid of respiratory crap – ask for a physio referral – they’ll teach you some useful techniques and a few months of postural drainage should bring about an improvement. Talk to your GP about pulmonary rehabilitation, too.With all due respect, if 79% of your airways were blocked you’d probably be dead or on a ventilator – and your level of medication doesn’t support that either. Likewise your walking distance – you wouldn’t be able to do that. I suspect that your airways are congested. That’s not the same as blocked, and a physio referral should improve that.DLA – the focus of a DLA application is what you can’t do, not what you can do. And you describe the bad times, not the good. Your doctor has to be willing to support you in terms of your disability, for a DLA application. It’s no good a doctor saying Yes, I think Patient X should have DLA. What your GP, and any consultants, will be asked by the DWP will be only related to your level of disability. What they think about your need for DLA will be ignored.But – and it’s a big but – medication, these days, is taken into account, and if they feel that the amount of drugs you’re taking is too low for the level of illness/disability you’re describing, then your claim would probably fail and, really, three inhalers, antibiotics and steroids represent a pretty low level of medication for disabling COPD. Omeprazole, by the way, is for GERD, not COPD, and if that’s a problem, you’d benefit from a bed wedge, and from sleeping on your left side, to minimise the risk of acid reflux.There’s some useful information on managing COPD here There’s also another problem – much of what you’re describing here seems to be unrelated to COPD or to your meds, and you really need to talk to your doctors about that as a matter of urgency. There may well be other factors at work.Ron.