Flare Up Recovery
I recently had a major flare up. The worst one I have had since being diagnosed with COPD 4 1/2 years ago. I caught a bit of flu in late February. My doctor prescribed Prednisone but no antibiotic since my mucus was clear and had no indication of infection. After a week of Prednisone, I was feeling better. I went to the grocery store with my wife and halfway thru shopping I started coughing up bloody mucus. I went back to the car while she finished shopping. The bloody mucus continued throughout the day and I contacted my doctor the next day. I got in to see my pulmonologist a day later. I gave them a sputum sample for testing and was given a prescription for Levaquin. The sample came back clean for pneumonia. The Levaquin is a pretty heavy duty antibiotic and knocked me down pretty much for a week. All I did was sleep and lay around. The bloody mucus quit after the week of Levaquin and has not returned. The flare up lasted a total of about 17 days. I has now been two more weeks and I am finally getting back to feeling normal again. It was all I could do to take a shower and just walk around the house for the first week after finishing the Levaquin. I started exercise this week and am getting back to my normal routine finally. This was a major wake up call for me, as I haven't had a major flare up until now since my diagnosis. So 17 days of misery followed by 14 days of recovery so far. So this flare up made me miserable for about a month total. Hopefully I won't go thru that again for a long time. I am a bit paranoid right now and am watching every situation I deal with on a daily basis. Right now Oak Pollen is over 17,000 in Central Texas. Needless to say, I am staying inside. I am also curious how long a flare up recovery has taken others. I look forward to any and all comments. Thank you for reading this post. Take care and God Bless!
Hi
. I am so glad you are feeling better and more like yourself. That must have been a scary experience. Flares can be different for everyone, but I hope you get lots of input from the community. It can help you feel less alone and a little less stress to know others have endured the same thing or more and have recovered. Stay safe and well. - Lori (Team Member) I am wondering what happened to this forum board. It used to be so active. Now it is like a graveyard. I used to be able to post daily and read new posts daily. I made lots of friends with similar medical problems as I. Now I am lucky to see a decent interesting post every two weeks or so. I admit that I have recently been looking for a more active message board to post on. Hopefully this message board will pick back up to being more active or I am afraid I will go else where to join a more active COPD forum. Come on people, help make this forum more active before it goes by the way side!
Hi
. It does seem that there is a bit less activity these days. I hope you hang in there with us for a bit until things pick up again. Thanks for always being here. It is people like you who make this community the warm and welcoming place that it is. Best of all wishes. - Lori (Team Member) 
, I appreciate you sharing these thoughts! I agree it's been a little quiet lately. Spring usually is around here, people tend to go outside and not online as much but I am hoping things pick up soon! Do you have any content or things you would like to see us talk about? We're always interested in what the community wants to hear about! Best, Sam S. (COPD team).
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There is nothing in particular you need to talk about. I think you all do a good job covering just about everything related to COPD. I have learned a lot visiting and posting here. I would just like to see more activity from members. Even if it is only to say hello, I am doing well. I see lots of people post here with a question and when it is answered, you never hear from them again. You never know if you helped or not. Then there are the ones who post questions that should be put to their respective medical team and basically cannot be answered by anyone here. I also wish more people would chose a user name instead of the generic "community member #" thing. It seems to impersonal. I realize you cannot force people to pick a user name or to post. It just frustrates me to visit daily and see nothing new posted or anything I can actually answer besides the generic " contact your medical team answer". Ok, I am done with this venting. Have a good day and God Bless!I appreciate all of that feedback! Best, Sam S. (COPD team)
I think you may have nailed it, there is so much info here, and it is so easy to find that there are fewer posts. I know that unless I have something fairly significant to add, I avoid posting. I don't want to simply create clutter for clutter's sake.
I have not had an exasperation for a while, at least since I caught Influenza A a while back, and am thankful for it. Like you, I watch what I do, weather, pollen, pollutants, etc, like a hawk to try and minimize the possibilities of another attack. They are scary as hell and shake confidence to the core when they happen. But there is only so much that we can do to avoid them, like driving a car. An accident is always lurking around the next corner. We just try to anticipate it and avoid it.
