I almost died today

I almost died today, when I ran up the stairs b/c i saw that my sister was back from her run and I knew it meant she would want to have a shower. Well I was planning on having my shower when I spotted her doing her 'cool down' outside on the sidewalk, so i turned the Monster on, ran up the stairs, threw my clothes off, ran into the bathroom, slammed the door, fell on to the floor, grabbed the rug with my hands, and began to die.

I huffed and I puffed and pain seared through my chest. I put my oxygen on as i shaked like i had brain problems, and I got no releif from the o2 flowing through the cannula. I felt delirious, delusional, like i was swimming through goo and I couldn't see or think straight. But I had to get into the shower so somehow, I got up and fell into the tub, and died in there as the water rained down on me and i had to begin catching my breath over and over again.

It took a good while for me to even beging to calm down. This short of breathness at this stage of lung disease is horrendous. It grips you till you feel like you're going to be physically sick, and it doesn't matter how much you huff and puff you can't reach a capacity to possibly calm yourself down...so you ride with it and pray to god that you stay conscious and make it out. It's bizarrely euphoric. When you're this out of breath, you don't just feel it in your heart and lungs: you feel it in your feet, your hands, your arms and legs and fingers, your thighs, your brain, your everything. Everything shakes and everything suffers and it doesn't matter what you do, releif cannot be found.

It is moments like this that I want to remember: as horrible and as frightening as they are, they are sentiments to remind me that this is really bigger than I am, and that it has a lot more power than I can truely understand. Do not underestimate the inability to breathe, for just when you think you've come up with a solution to deceive it, it comes at you full force and knocks you down and knocks you out. It is painful and frightening, beautiful and ugly, enabling and crippling, and unexplainably horrible.

It is the worst pain you can feel - dull and explosive, and nothing can releive it. You just wait until it wants to leave..and sometimes that's the scariest of all.

Day 14 of being listed.