What is peak flow and what do the numbers mean? You and a few others on my friends list mention it, and I have no idea what it means (I tried googling but I could only find pretty vague information).
It's a measurement of how much air a person exhales. In general theory, it functions like blood sugar except that you don't get peak flows that are too high. You have your personal normal peak flows as compared to the normal peak flow for your age range, and that helps determine whether or not you have asthma or other respiratory illness. Then once your normal peak flow is established, you have zones that determine when to increase your treatment or seek emergency care.
So normal for my age bracket is 450 to 475. My personal normal before all the polyp surgery stuff was 360--I had never gotten above it. The 225 I experienced a few weeks ago was really scaring me because a couple of days before it occurred to me to take that measurement I wasn't exhaling enough air to use my voice. I should have been in the hospital getting nebulizers or something. So the 500 is a huge deal for me. Figuring out that this has something to do with breathing muscles is also a big deal because it gives me something to talk with my doctor about. I'm not sure whether there is anything to do about it.
I used to have a peak flow meter, I got bronchitis about 5 times a year (never really *quite* got over it, really) and also pneumonia a lot. I still have sinus and allergy problems, but a lot of things have gotten a lot better in the past few years.
Oh so you know exactly what my life has been like for the past gazillion years and why this is a huge deal... I was first diagnosed with allergies in 1981 and was constantly on antihistamines and decongestants. Despite this my airways were 90 percent blocked. In 1994 I had bronchitis so many times that my internist said he would need to call a specialist, and that's when I was diagnosed with asthma. There have been a couple of two-year periods when I was not sick since then, but for the most part it's been a constant battle and I feel like a caged bird waiting to get free.
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So normal for my age bracket is 450 to 475. My personal normal before all the polyp surgery stuff was 360--I had never gotten above it. The 225 I experienced a few weeks ago was really scaring me because a couple of days before it occurred to me to take that measurement I wasn't exhaling enough air to use my voice. I should have been in the hospital getting nebulizers or something. So the 500 is a huge deal for me. Figuring out that this has something to do with breathing muscles is also a big deal because it gives me something to talk with my doctor about. I'm not sure whether there is anything to do about it.
I used to have a peak flow meter, I got bronchitis about 5 times a year (never really *quite* got over it, really) and also pneumonia a lot. I still have sinus and allergy problems, but a lot of things have gotten a lot better in the past few years.