DOCTOR DOCTOR GIMMIE THE NEWS

Blog number 359 **** 10 January 2009

My son and his wife were over today and I told my son's wife a story which ended just as my son came into the room. He asked what I was saying, but I told him it was too long and I had just finished the long story to his wife, but that I would write it in my Blog, so here ''tis.

When we lived in Sacramento I had asthma real bad. I used an inhaler for when it was difficult to breath and I also had another inhaler for longer term relief. It was called, "Chlor-something" and was a steroid. I was supposed to use it twice a day and it was supposed to make it so I wouldn't have to use the regular inhaler so often.The directions warned that I was so rinse my mouth out after every use, otherwise I could get fungus growing in my mouth.

Now I thought, "look. My lungs ain't that far from my mouth and actually they both have the same climate, so isn't it likely that fungus would grow in my lungs?"

I told the doctor my concerns, figuring he would see the logic of this, but, "No, fungus would not grow in my lungs," this highly trained medical scientist doctor told me.

Every month or so it would get so hard for me to breath that I had to go to the emergency room for treatment. Adrenaline works wonders for this. After three or four trips to the emergency room, I got a replacement drug - Fortran. Now this sucker worked! I used to have to wake up several times each night to suck on my inhaler, but after a few days of the Fortran, I could sleep all night.

I figured from this that my original worries had been right on. That thing was growing fungus in my lungs. So when I got a telephone call from a researcher at the hospital asking if she could ask a few questions about that steroid drug, I was off and running. I didn't even wait for one question. I told her about it putting me in the emergency room and I told her it was a dangerous bad drug and nobody should ever take it, and some other things I now forget. She never did ask me any questions about it, just said thank you and hung up. I think what happened was that they were getting some bad reports and were checking out the users.