Spirometers

Today I had a pulmonary function test, where they measured something to do with my lung volume and breathing, first normally and then with a bronchodilator (albuterol). The doctor decided to do this since I was prescribed an inhaler for allergy related asthma, but had never had one of these tests done. They take your height and weight (according to them I am at least an inch shorter than I thought!) and your age and race and sex, and basically compare you to others in your bracket to see if your numbers are normal or not.

You get to breathe through a device, where they have you breathe normally, and then take a deep breath and exhale as hard and fast and as completely as you can. You do this a few times, and then they give you a bronchodilator. If it weren’t in such a sterile hospital setting you’d think you were smoking some exotic alien drug, the way the gases roll out of the tube they hand you. I had to breath that for about 8 minutes, then wait another 10 (it made me feel a bit shaky and light-headed — he said that feeling jittery was normal, and he figured the light headedness was due to all the deep breaths). Then you do the test with the device again (breathing and deep breaths/forced exhalation) and they measure the difference.

I won’t be seeing my doc(s) until a little over a week from now, but I asked the tech (that may be the wrong term, I only know he said he was not a doctor) what the results looked like. He showed me the numbers he got, and explained that my lung volume exceeded predictions for my bracket (at my best I got 4.8L and 4.6 at my worst, predicted was about 4.2) and that I was in the 99 and 100th percentiles for the flow rates (I think that’s what those percentages were for, I could have that confused and that was for the volumes instead, but regardless he said the flow rates were also normal). Then with the bronchodilator I showed a small increase in the flow rates (though not so much in the volume). He says that part doesn’t really tell them much.

So woo hoo! I can breathe good!

Basically, he said, it looks like my lungs are normal. I’m surprised, because I always thought my lung capacity was smaller than normal since whenever I was asked to exhale for something I seemed to run out of breath more quickly than the tester expected (I figured that was part of the asthmatic response to the allergies).

Of course, I have to wait to see what the doctors say about the results. (I wonder if it’s a bad thing that the bronchodilator didn’t have a fabulously dramatic effect?) But I won’t be stressing about it all week until I see them.