Barbara talks about monitoring her symptoms to manage COPD and heart failure.
Transcript
Now one of the side effects of COPD is shortness of breath. It is the biggest complaint from people with COPD, but when you have heart failure the shortness of breath comes from the heart not being able to keep up and it has to pump so much faster to do the same thing that it would normally do. And so very often – and I’m thinking lately that as I am monitoring my symptoms and I have an oximeter that I use quite frequently, I’m obviously on oxygen 24 hours a day – and as I’m monitoring my symptoms and what’s going on when I become short of breath lately I’m finding that it’s more my heart than my lungs. So we can control my oxygen with the supplemental oxygen but what we can’t control is the water that sits around my heart and that means that my heart has to beat twice as fast as it should.
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