Published On:
January 27, 2010
Not that I was going to willfully disobey to good doctor, I just wasn't going to ever go back to Sommerset if I could avoid it! Instead, I got a new gastro and he's much better at pretty much everything. Plus I was a bit more concerned about the whole lung issue. After all, I am the queen of bronchitis and was concerned this might have something to do with it.
I've always known everything was connected, body-wise, but even I didn't think of my liver having much of anything to do with my lungs!
After seeing my pulmonologist (the same one I saw before the sleep apnea surgery) and had more blood-work done to see exactly what level of deficiency I was dealing with and a PFT to make sure I'd sustained no lung damage (I hadn't, yay!) we're just monitoring things. Apparently, if I were a smoker or around smokers a lot I could easily have emphysema by now (or COPD, etc) because the A1AT is what keeps the white blood cells from over-cleaning the lungs after illness or exposure to smoke, etc., causing loss of elasticity and a whole heap of other things. I have so little of it available to my lungs because my liver is producing it but keeping hold of it. This puts me at a higher risk of cirrhosis and other fun stuff like that, so that's what the gastro is monitoring.
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