We spend a lot of our time waiting for test results. It used to be much harder. Now it's not quite so hard. I guess the more you pack into your life (we are now a family of five, and we really pack it in!) the less time you have to worry. Usually it's results from the lab - if his cough seems worse, he coughs up into a pot, or on a swab, and we send that into the lab. It's as easy as dropping it off at our GP round the corner, which is great. 4 or 5 days later, we get the results from the lab. They are not slow, they need to grow the bugs in the sample to identify them, and that takes up to a week. Then, if we need to, we swap his antibiotic to one that is sensitive to that particular bug. We do this maybe once a month, more often when unwell. When really bad, we send in samples every other day - one sample might be negative, the next positive. Whilst you might hope for a negative result, if he's coughing, that tells us nothing. It doesn't mean he's not actually growing anything, just that the sputum in that pot didn't contain the infected sputum. A positive result means we can treat the infection with the correct medication, which is what we want. Stop it in it's tracks. A big F you to the bugs. So we spend a lot of time waiting for results.
This week has been about waiting for the CT results. Today I had an email from our (amazing) CF specialist nurse 'CT looks good, we'll chat it over at our X-ray meeting and I'll get one of the doctors to call you back'. Big relief. Big glass of vodka for Mum. Maybe I had been worrying about that one a little more than I thought.
