Better day in some ways, worse in others

Okay, so today I was psychologically a LOT better than yesterday. Physically, the answer is worse. My breathing was so bad a good chunk of the time that I was actually wondering if I should bus down to the urgent care center. Actually, at one point I was wondering if I was starting to have an allergic reaction because I was eating dinner...but it didn't seem to get worse.

Certain things seem to help, two positions work. One is bending over, and after looking at a diagram of the heart again it makes sense. I have aortic valve insufficiency, which means that some of the blood is flowing back into my ventricle when it should be going through the valve and into my aorta. If I'm bending over so that I'm basically upside down...gravity is probably helping to reverse that. The other weird position that helps, and I have NO clue on this one, because logic tells me it shouldn't (research says that it actually increases the sound of the murmur of aortic insufficiency), is squatting. I found that out randomly tonight. I always find things out randomly...in this case, I found that out while squatting to put my flute together. I had been breathing REALLY badly (this was right after eating dinner), and so being able to breath a lot more normally was a VERY nice thing!!! I basically practised the whole 45 minutes that I did squatting. I had to shift around a bit to keep my feet from losing circulation, but there was no denying that it worked. Every time I tried to stand and practice, my breathing would get really messed up again. I ended up working on my paper squatting a bit as well...which looked REALLY strange. At least in the practice room I had the door shut, but writing the paper I was in the open!

Yes, I was working on my paper for Research Methods! With some pretty good success, actually! I wrote close to 1000 words today in a pretty short amount of time, and was having fun too. I should be able to get it finished tomorrow. THAT will feel so amazing.

Tomorrow is my pulmonary function test. Let's just say I want answers, and I want them SOON. I can't play properly, I'm frequently having trouble breathing that's bothersome (at the least)...Is it too much for a flautist to ask to be able to breathe properly all the time?

So that was my day. Good on some points, but ARGH on breathing. Life, I guess.