Battling a first class cold right now. Started as just a throat cough, now congested and run down. Of course the "run down" is probably not the cold itself, but the always fun cold and cough medications I take so I can simply lay down and get some rest.  I did run all weekend and did some heavy duty housework as well. I guess maybe this hangover is from the abundance of drugs in my system, not a cold growing into something worse..

It is fairly common, and a real concern as a dialysis patient to have simply things like colds morph into something far more serious. It has happened to be many times in the past six years where I was fine with a minor something or other one day, and then in the emergency room the next with a crippling fever and a dangerous infection or pneumonia. Seriously no fun. As I've said many times since starting this blog in July, it has been a great year completely uninterrupted by an episode like that or anything else. Last year, September all the way through the second week of December it was one long (with lots of mini series in between) event of illness. Never really shaking all of it I eventually found myself in the hospital in late November and early December being treated for the remnants of an infection that never completely went away, and a touch of pneumonia. The whole last fall I did what I could, still ran, not well, but still ran, still worked, and still did the family stuff, just not very well, and with a lot of rest in between. Since the last hospitalization in December 09, I had just such a good year overall, and staying away from the emergency room is a real plus. So having a cold that slows me at all makes me nervous. The staff at dialysis stays on top of it all and has ordered me to get a chest x-ray if this all persists. It is well understood that as a dialysis patient with compromised immune system, these types of things can get out of hand very fast. I am grateful and do appreciate the attention to detail I receive in this situation, even though it comes a the price of being a dialysis patient and all that that involves for my life.