When the reality is your own, it’s one thing. You fight with it and you fight with it and you learn your own new reality. When the reality isn’t yours (or at least not primarily yours) it’s so very much harder.
While I was away in Las Vegas (it seems like a lifetime ago now, not just a matter of a week or so) Bear had to come to terms with the pulmonologist telling him that he NEEDS to be on Oxygen. Tomorrow marks two weeks since he got his first set of Oxygen bottles… since they put the sign in the front window… since we have had a whole new set of “a day like no other”.
We went to the Akron Zoo today. It’s a really nice zoo. Not very big, but very interesting… very well put together. The Sea Otter exhibit has a slide that even adults can ride through the water (the tunnel goes through the exhibit). Oxygen didn’t stop him from riding the slide.
He had to change bottles halfway through the zoo. He came to grips with having to take his oxygen with hime when we go out. But with a limit of “maybe” 12 bottles (45 minutes each bottle) a week that the Oxygen place can give him… Going for walkies with Peanut every evening and doing ANYTHING any other time of the week is going to be a challenge.
He still can’t walk a half marathon any more, but the oxygen is really helping an awful lot. He’s feeling better, physically, than he has in a while.
Mentally, he’s still coming to terms with being on Oxygen. He didn’t hide the hoses today when we were taking pictures. I didn’t even have to sneak to get pictures of the new reality. He even said that he will probably not hide the hoses when we get some of the pictures taken at Disney in September.
This week we should have his Inogen that I bought him for his birthday delivered. I pray it works. I don’t know what I’m going to do if it doesn’t (other than send it back because he has a 30 day grace period to see if it works for him). He’s going to make himself sick trying to figure out how we are going to pay for it (I got the unit… but it came with high interest rates and a short interest free period) but it if works and it helps it will be worth every cent.
Our new reality is sometimes scary, and sometimes sobering, but what new realities aren’t a little scary.
Love and Light
April
4/16/2017
Happy Easter
A Figment Of Fitness 
Happy Easter April.
I think that having an oxygen device is much the same as having a wheelchair. It makes us more self-conscious than others notice. I wish him the very best and keep reminding him about the day at the zoo and that cool slide. Best,,
rick
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