Well, that didn’t go so well

Two weeks ago today, I picked up my back brace.

We’ve been thinking about getting me a back brace for some time now. Ever since I dislocated two ribs in March, really. After that happened, I had bought a soft posture corrector online. It seemed to help reduce my rib pain, and had the added bonus of keeping my posture a bit better. I’ve had back problems since I was 15, and shoulder problems since I was 17, and this seemed to be helping a little bit with both.

So my doctor decided that if the soft, kind of generic shaped posture corrector was helping, perhaps we should go in for something a little more structured. He sent me off to an orthotist, and the orthotist picked out a brace for me. It’s pretty new to the market, and part of what we all liked about it is that it’s a slim, light weight design. The California Eco brace seemed like a good answer for what I need – it provides support to both the lumbar and thoracic (that is, lower and mid-back, which covers most of my problem answers), and it helps pull the shoulders back and keep the spine aligned from the sacrum (the pelvis/hip bones) to the base of the neck. If you’re curious about it, you can see a good description and picture of it here – http://www.orthomerica.com/product/1606696-california-eco.

Now, I was supposed to pick this thing up MONTHS ago, no exaggeration. But we moved, and while I was still in physical therapy for the ribs and the back issues that came with them, I started my summer class. The summer class ended, and then my auto-immune thing flared wildly. I had bigger fish to fry than picking up a brace. Then fall classes were starting, and the auto-immune thing was still giving me problems, and my insomnia decided it needed to be a bigger part of my life. And frankly, if we’re being honest here, I procrastinated a bit about picking it up. I didn’t want to wear it. I didn’t want to be deciding whether I would deal with it making me all lumpy under my clothing or whether I’d wear it on the outside where it’d be visible. Anyhow, the stars and planets finally cooperated, and I was able to pick it up two weeks ago.

They told me to use the usual wearing-in schedule. For those of you not familiar with braces intended for long-term wear, this is how it works. You have to gently accustom your body to the new piece of equipment. So typically, you wear it for one hour on the first day you have it, and slowly increase the amount of time you wear it until you’re able to wear it for as long as you’re supposed to. I suppose ideally, I’d be working up to wearing it whenever I’m not in bed. Anyhow, the point here is that you start with one hour of wear typically. Being a somewhat cautious soul, I started by wearing it for 40 minutes.

It felt weird to have my posture altered like that, but not bad. It did feel good to take the brace off at the end of that 40 minutes, but anyone who wears braces will tell you that it pretty much always feels good to get the brace off at the end of the day, even when you’re completely adjusted and accustomed to it.

It was perhaps 6 hours later that problems started. I was watching TV and relaxing, and suddenly there is a horizontal bar of pain about an inch wide slicing across a space slightly broader than my spine. There were only a few minutes left to the show, so I figure I’ll just watch to the end and then go and lie down. The pain starts spreading, first the bar extending horizontally, and then increasing vertically. It traced down my spine and up my spine. My head began hurting terribly. And then it started affecting other things – my abdomen hurt so badly that I started retching. I went and lie down in bed, and the pain was bad enough that I was making noise and woke my fiance. I ended up throwing up, and it took me a while to figure out that I wasn’t having a tension-induced migraine (which was how I initially interpreted the combination of headache and nausea/vomiting). I got out my tennis ball and started working on the muscles right around where the pain started. It took me a good long while, but I finally got the worst of the pain to abate.

I spent the next week using heat, the tennis ball ‘massage’, and stretching to try to get the whole thing under control. I was doing not too badly by the weekend, but come Monday it got worse. So Tuesday, I got in to see the same day clinic at my doctor’s office. He’s impossible to get a same day appointment with, but the doctor I saw was quite pleasant. She gave me 2 weeks’ worth of muscle relaxants, and perhaps more importantly, a prescription for physical therapy.

I bumbled through a week of feeling truly dreadful, and then today was finally able to see my physical therapist. He does think that the brace is a reasonable choice, but we need to do some work on my back before my back is ready for it. And I need a much slower wear-in schedule, starting with no more than half the time I originally attempted. Shoot, I think I’ll probably just do 10 minutes to start! Anyhow, he did a lot of mobilization on my spine today, because that was a big part of the continuing problem – the muscles that support the vertebrae had locked up so badly that nothing could move. It was definitely not the most pleasant physical therapy session I’ve ever had, and my back is very tender now, but I am hopeful that this will help. The physical therapist also believes that in the long run, the brace will likely be good for me. It’s just getting to the point where I can tolerate it that’s the trouble.

In other news – I got my results for my blood work. It’s not going to be helpful in diagnosing me. All of the tests to pinpoint more specifically what kind of auto-immune condition we’re dealing with came back in normal ranges. Whatever I have, I apparently have the sero-negative version. While that’s not unheard of, it is a bit unusual. I suppose given how often I have the unusual version of conditions, I shouldn’t be surprised! I see the rheumatologist a week from tomorrow to see what he has to say on the matter. I hope that he’s able to put me on something that isn’t the prednisone I’ve now been on for almost two months. It has my insomnia acting up, and I have terrible heat flashes (to the point where I’ve been keeping the house about 4 degrees cooler than I usually tolerate, which is 6 degrees cooler than I normally like), and a couple weeks ago, I chewed out the fiance so badly over something utterly inconsequential that he was afraid to come home from work. Oh, and I’m sweating buckets, and I’d like to eat the whole world. Quite the unpleasant little drug. Necessary, but unpleasant. I’m worried that my doctor will want to keep me on it. If that’s the case, they’re probably going to need to increase my dose again, because the hand, foot, knee, and back pain is all coming back, and my hands are visibly swollen again. this is all getting old, body! I’m fed up with being swollen up. I just want you to go back to playing nice and not beating yourself up.

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Still Lyme-y

So I continue to be sick.

I finished my course of antibiotics some time ago. Within a week it was clear I was rebounding. I’ve been measuring my wrists and trying rings on my fingers, so I have objective measurements that show that the antibiotics helped and that things got worse when I was off of them. My GP is very, very popular, so it was hard to get in with him. I saw other people in his office, and they didn’t want to continue treating me with antibiotics. They wanted to send me off to specialists – first the rheumatologist, and if he wasn’t happy treating the probably-Lyme, then to Infectious Diseases. Certainly, they didn’t want me in their hands.

I finally got in to see my GP yesterday. His take on the situation is that either I have Lyme or I have some other systemic infection that is causing generalized inflammation. Regardless, the antibiotics bring down the inflammation and give me ENORMOUS benefits to my quality of life, so he is happy to continue treating me with them. Thank god. As of yesterday evening, I am back on the amoxicillin. We talked about options, and agreed that A) I am going to see an Infectious Diseases specialist and B) we are going to use an IV antibiotic. For treating Lyme, the oral drug of choice is doxycycline, which I react very, very badly to.* Because of that, I am taking the second line drug, amoxicillin. According to my GP, oral doxycycline can be as effective as the IV drugs (though that doesn’t match up with my recollection from researching this – my recollection is the IV drugs beat doxy), but amoxicillin cannot compete on the same level. That’s why he agreed to the IV antibiotics.

He’s still treating me relatively conservatively – not really high doses, not really long courses – but given all of my other conditions and my general sensitivity to medications, I think it’s for the best. If this round doesn’t take care of things, we’ll have to reconsider what we’re doing, but by then we’ll have a specialist on board to advise. I can only hope that the people in the Infectious Diseases department believe in Lyme as a devastating, long-term illness that can be hard to wipe out rather than the image some organizations present, where Lyme is supposed to be easily knocked out with a single, relatively short course of antibiotics. I do not want to continue living like this – I am in an enormous amount of pain, to the point where it’s hard to care about anything because existing hurts. Even lying on my very soft, comfortable bed hurts – if I lie on my side, my ribs and oblique muscles on the side that is up feel like they’re getting worked or stretched very hard and become painful (which makes me need to flip often), and if I lie on my back, my back and neck start complaining. And lying down is generally the most comfortable thing I can do. Right now, I need to wake up at least a half an hour before I need to start moving, so I can take a pill for the pain and wait for it to kick in. Best of all is when I wake up 2-3 hours before I need to get up: I can take the pain pill then, and go back to sleep. If I’m lucky, I’ll wake up again a little while before I have to start moving, because for some reason, the pain fades slowly if I am simply awake. I have no idea why, I only know how it works.

Blah. All of this pain, this frustration, and I have other things that need to be dealt with. I need to see my gastrointestinal specialist because my stomach has been very, very bothersome of late, and I need to talk to my sleep specialist because of a medication mix-up. I need to make an appointment with the Infectious Diseases person, who I am quite nervous about. I need to decide whether or not to cancel the rheumatologist appointment I have for Monday (my instinct is to cancel). I need x-rays and possibly an MRI done of my neck because I have pinched nerve symptoms; for that matter, the headache people wanted an MRI of my head, too, due to my headaches.

All of that, and I am sitting here in a cloud of smelly dog-fart, writing this post, because…well. Because I know people come here to read what it’s like to live my life, with my conditions and my service dog and my dreams and my fiance. Because on some level, this gives me a feeling of having some meaning, if only to get people to understand a bit more about what it’s like to be disabled but not in one of the ‘typical’ ways. (I tend to think of being blind, deaf, and having some form of paralysis as being the better understood forms of disability, though I know that even with those, the understanding of outsiders is horribly inaccurate.)

Nnf. This rambling, wandering, probably less-than-polite post is brought to you by probably-Lyme. (Why the hell is it always probably-something in my life?! I swear, not a single condition that I’ve got was easy to diagnose, and every stinking one of them was either missed or nearly missed by at least one medical professional before I found someone who got it, and then started getting the treatment I needed.) Anyhow, I think that’s intended to be and explanation, and perhaps something of an apology. I know I am neither at my best nor writing as often as I would like (by a long shot on the latter at least!). I am, nonetheless, here. That has to count for something.

*It starts with flushing in the face and on the chest, then moves to a kind of dazed confusion. Finally, my tongue and throat begin to swell, which is called anaphylaxis. It’s one of the most dangerous reactions to medications that exists because it will eventually make it impossible to breathe. Especially in someone with asthma (like me), there is potential for the swelling to go all the way down into the lungs, at which point you are DEAD – nothing they can do. Fortunately for me, anaphylaxis set in quite slowly, so they were able to get antihistamines and adrenaline into my system before my breathing was even labored.

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Not thankful.

A great many people take Thanksgiving as a time to reflect on what they are grateful for, and how great their lives really are.

I’m not.  It’s the end of Thanksgiving weekend, and I didn’t get more than a couple hours worth of schoolwork done all weekend when I was hoping to get caught up.  My concentration is shit and I keep dozing off over my books.  I may not be allowed to take one of my exams because I missed a ton of class due to this muscular whatever the hell that seems to be tangled up with the arthritis.  While I feel better once I’ve been awake for about 3 hours, that’s longer than I can manage to be awake before class (that is, I can’t wake up 3 hours before class).  Were I to try it, I’d have to stay lying down because I’ve had a very limited amount of sit-up time, and I’d fall back asleep.  I did try once.  Fail.

I’m tired.  I’m sick – I have something that has completely stuffed up my head and blocked up my ears, and I have a GI bug giving me diarrhea.  Monday, I fainted and we don’t know why – I wasn’t having any dysautonomia/POTS symptoms, I just turned my head to the right, had shooting pain, and woke up slouched against the couch.  On Tuesday, Hudson did the unbelievable – he pooped in the building where my physical therapists’ is.  My sleep schedule is utterly and completely screwed up.  I keep forgetting to make the phone calls I need to make to get doctor’s apts and other things set up.  Not getting those appointments means I don’t get help with the things that are causing problems.  It’s a lovely catch-22.

The arthritis-of-some-kind is improving dramatically, but the improvement in my joints has made something else very clear.  I think at the beginning, about 1/2 of my pain and loss of motion was muscular; at this point, I’d say that’s 3/4 of what I’m experiencing.  I suspect I couldn’t separate the two out because with EDS, the pain is as much in your muscles and surrounding ligaments as it is in your joints themselves.  And it doesn’t improve.  Heat makes it very slightly better, motion starts as agony but eases into more comfortable motion.  Rest just means that I’ll be in pain when I start moving again (though if I do not rest and try to move all the time, the result is even worse).  I don’t really know what to do about all of that.

I forgot to get some critical paperwork filled out, and the deadline was 2 weeks ago.  I’m not sure if they’ll be able to work with me.

I had this dream several weeks ago, that I was diagnosed formally for the arthritis.  I quit law school, and between us my fiance and I put together a shop where I could do just about anything artistic I wanted.  It was quite a nice dream.  The best part was that I no longer had massive deadlines hanging over my head.  I’ve fallen behind on everything and blown every deadline since this all started in March.  I’m tired of always waiting for someone to get upset with me because I’m not doing enough, not present enough, et cetera.

It’s funny, I dream about not going to law school and I’m not sure I want to finish, and yet my first response to an email that suggested I might not be allowed to finish a class (and possibly more than one)  was to be so deeply upset that I was wildly nauseous and very upset.  I am less upset now, and the nausea is mild compared to how it was, but I still am loathe to accept an external force causing me to quit rather than choosing it for myself.  Because I’ll admit, it is a possibility.  It’s just not one I like much when I don’t have a choice, and when I have gotten So Damn Close to finishing law school.

I’m not saying I don’t have things to be thankful for.  I do.  I’m just refusing to be a Pollyanna and pretend that those things are in and of themselves enough to make life all good right now.  My fiance and my dog are wonderful, my lawschool has been pretty good about working with me, I have health insurance and a roof over my head and a car that functions, and all of these are good things.  Just life as a whole is…on the rough side right now.

Bleh.  My stomach is roiling again, and hte muscles of my arms, legs, back, and abdomen all ache and hurt.  This kind of pain makes me think of over-twisted rope, ready to snap.  *sigh*

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Thank you.

Alan,

I know you will probably never see this blog, but I wanted to put this out here.

This afternoon in the ER, when they wanted to put in an IV to draw blood, I got hysterical.  My last trip to the ER involved what was even for me a rough time getting an IV in.  I was borderline phobic before, and have crossed into the real thing once again, I think.  I was when I was younger, and being re-traumatized didn’t help.

Without meds, you talked me down and distracted me, and hit a vein on the first try with minimal pain.  Thank you for NOT treating me as if my reaction was unreasonable or inconvenient.  That basic kindness and decency is so deeply helpful in situations like this.  It seems to be much the character of the ER you work in, but this was an unusually strong exemplar of just how awesome you guys are at this ER.  There’s a reason we don’t like to go anywhere else – I get treated compassionately, kindly, and thoughtfully here.  There are never issues with my service dog, and people actually care if I am okay.  ERs like yours seem to be a sadly rare phenomenon.  I can’t tell you how often I have been treated as if I was nothing more than a difficulty in other places.

So thank you.  Thank you for caring enough to not want me falling apart and sobbing.  Thank you for making this a non-traumatic experience.  But most of all, thank you for being patient and kind.

 

(P.S. – if you’re wondering about why I ended up in the ER, it’s kind of an odd story.  You see, this afternoon, right after I posted my most recent post before this one, something weird happened.  I had had a headache since last night which was neither a migraine nor a tension headache, as treatments that work on those had no effect on it.  I turned my head to the right, heard and felt a crack in my neck, felt shooting pain going to my left armpit and down the left side of the spine, and passed out.  I came to less than a minute later, dizzy and nauseated.  A little while later, I got to my phone and called my doctor’s office, where they advised me to go to the ER.  I threw up shortly after that, called myself a cab, and decamped off to the ER.  They did a little bit of testing (ekg and bloodwork), poked me a bit, and decided to send me home.  Apparently, I’m not urgently in trouble, but they do want me back in with my GP to try to get to the bottom of this.  Precisely what I needed with exams starting in two weeks, ah well.  This will certainly be…entertaining.

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Ack! Ouch!

I went off my most recent rheumatological med yesterday morning.

I guess I hadn’t realized how well it was working, because man am I ever in bad shape now.  I feel like I was trampled by a herd of horses.  My hands are in loads of pain, my back is agony, my feet are tender, and my knees rebel every time I even think about going upstairs.  I’m on percocet for the pain until I can get a hold of my rheum and ask for a new med.  My fingers are up 1/2 a ring size, and my wrists are about 15% larger than normal.  It hurts where my ribs meet my spine and where they meet my breastbone.  I’m actually nauseated from the pain.

I’m annoyed.  I auctioned a lace scarf almost two months ago to support some rebuilding efforts in Haiti via Random Acts, and I haven’t been able to finish it and send it to the (very understanding) buyer.  I really feel bad as the buyer had wanted to give it to her mother for her birthday last week.  And now it’s delayed until I can get a new med, AGAIN.

I’m very glad I dropped my research class, because all of these days I’ve lost to physically not being well this summer would have added up to a very poor project.  Certainly not anything worthy of my friend’s memory.

I’m frustrated that I’m having to try another new medication for the pain and swelling.  This makes three I’ve had to be pulled off (though one of those was only intended to be a short-term fix, but it didn’t survive even the amount of time we hoped it would).  Two went down to GI side-effects, and this one went down to fatigue and generalized muscle cramps.

I’m sick of this.  Sick of being sick with whatever it is hitting my joints, sick of the meds, sick of the side effects, sick of having to stop taking things that are working.

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ARG – down it is.

Well, this newest med has to be stopped.  I got two of the ‘call your doctor immediately’ symptoms.  From what I’ve read, they aren’t immediately dangerous (that is, it’s not for example an allergic reaction or thrombosis) so I don’t need the ER, but I do need to stop the new rheumatological med.

I was sleeping an extra 3-4 hours a night and last night, I started getting muscle cramps everywhere.  I’m still feeling painfully sore from that, but it is improving.  Grr.  I hate the medi-go-round.  I guess I’ll be starting a new med when I talk to my rheumatologist again.

You just can’t win sometimes!

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Test One-two-three (anything but that!)

(Why yes, that title is a Rent reference.  I ❤ the show and the movie)

I have medical testing coming up that I am not looking forward to – some because I think it will be unpleasant, some because there are no good answers.

The one I expect to be painful is an ultrasound of my hands.  I remember how firmly they press on say your abdomen for ultrasound imaging; that kind of pressure on my hands would be AGONY.  I suppose there aren’t really good answers on this test, now that  I think about it.  Either they will find inflammation that backs up the theory that I have something like rheumatoid arthritis (RA), or they’ll decide there isn’t inflammation there and we don’t know why my hands hurt nor why they look swollen.

I’m supposed to have an MRI of my brain done, because my former headache specialist worried that I might have pockets of fluid building up in my brain, due to the kind fo headaches I get on a near-daily basis now.  Again, there aren’t really any good answers – if nothing shows, then we have to keep investigating to see what is causing the headaches.  If it does show, that means brain surgery.  And oh yeah, having a MRI is no walk in the park.  This one will be with and without contrast, so they will fix my head in a specialized vice that partially blocks my vision, put me head-first into a long narrow tube I barely fit in, and then there’s all the noise and the vibration (which hurts a lot!).  As if that wasn’t bad enough, they’ll pull me about 2/3 of the way out so they can put in an IV and inject in the contrast material, then put me back in the tube.  I’m mildly claustrophobic, and both the head vice thing and taking me out and putting me back in considerably aggrivate the way I feel about it.

Then there’s a rotational CT scan of my neck and where the head meets the neck.  I have symptoms that could match up to craniocervical instability (CCI), which is vastly more likely in people who have connective tissue disorders like mine.  If I don’t have CCI, then we have a question about what is causing a lot of symptoms that include pinched nerve symptoms in both my arms.  If I do have it…whoa.  Surgery, but that surgery might take care of a slew of issues that have affected me over the last 4 years.  However, I won’t be able to get the botox injections into my neck that they think would stop my migraines because my head would already be unstable enough on my neck that they would be worried about destabilizing it more.  The test itself isn’t too onerous, at least – I turn my head all the way to one side and go through a mechanical doughnut rather quickly, then turn my head to the other side and go through it again.

I also need an MRI of my mid-back to see if the maybe-RA is attacking my spine or if the pain is coming from something else.  This is another relatively painless test, but the results are something I’m not sure I want to know.  If it is the maybe-RA, I suppose they’ll treat more aggressively.  If it isn’t…well.  We have to figure out what’s causing new back pain, how and why, because this back pain is neither normal nor tolerable for me.

I don’t really know what I want at this point.  I am tired of feeling like crap, so I would like to feel less like crap, but I don’t know what test results or medications will offer that solution.  In the meanwhile, I guess I keep on keepin’ on.  It starts to feel a bit surreal sometimes, and other times it feels like I keep going out of habit or lack of palatable alternatives.

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Up? Down?

One of the things that comes with having chronic illnesses is new medications.  Getting a new medication is this awful mixture of hope and fear.

You hope it works.  You really do, because you’re sick of the pain and other symptoms.  At the same time, you’re often getting a new medication because either an old one stopped working or because the side-effects were intolerable, and you worry that the new medication will be more of the same.

I’m starting a new medication for the maybe-it’s-RA that has been plaguing me for a while.  We discovered today that it may have moved into my spine; I’ve had pain there for a while, which a horrid nurse practitioner dismissed as being because I’m fat without even looking at it.  I mentioned it to my rheumy today because it seems to be limited to my spine itself and it doesn’t respond to stretching or exercises, only to heat (well, and it gets cranky when I sit up or stay in the same position for long).  My hands, wrists, feet, and ankles are all crying out right now, and my left knee has warned me that it is displeased with me.

So you see, on the one hand, I am desperate for something to help with this.

On the other hand, there’s a reason I stopped the other med.  It worked quite well, and the reduction of pain was astonishing.  But it had side effects I couldn’t tolerate.  I already have stomach problems, and it exascerbated them.  My stomach hurt terribly, and I was nauseated and had heartburn.  I could hardly eat, and felt quite miserable all the time.  I don’t want to go through that again – my stomach is finally behaving itself and I’d rather let it be!  But I need relief from the maybe-it’s-RA, especially as that can do permanent damage if it’s not kept in check.

So I sit here, staring at the bottle and wondering, will this work as well as the last one?  Will it have fewer side effects?  I can only hope.

I go through this every time I add a new medication, hoping it’s effective and that the side effects are tolerable.  Can you imagine doing that over and over and over?  As each new condition rears its head, as each medication loses effectiveness or develops intolerable side effects, a new medication has to be attempted.

Wish me luck.

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Working on Chronic Illness Time

One of the frustrating things about having a chronic illness is that you often have to work on its time.  You can have all kinds of plans, only to have your illness decide it feels like kicking your butt worse than normal.  Or maybe you plan for things to be bad, only to have a good day.  Maybe you just THINK it’s a good day, so you over-extend yourself until you’re near collapsing far from home.  Or maybe you just have a bipolar meltdown and are having trouble getting out of bed because your sense of impending doom is so damn intense.

I’ve been dealing with a lot of stuff healthwise lately.  The prescription they put me on for the pain and swelling in my joints seems to disagree violently with my GI system.  My pain specialist told me to go off it for a week, which helped enormously with my GI but wrought havoc on my joints.  They’re now almost as puffy as they were when I first went to the rheumatologist.

It’s frustrating, because I’ve made commitments.  I’m working on a research project that is intended to become an article written with a friend.  It’s a big deal – law students rarely get journal articles published, so if I do, it’s a major feather in my cap.  It’s also on a subject I care a great deal about: privacy and the internet.  You see, I think we should be able to talk freely and read freely, without someone able to track every website I visit and every comment I make easily.  I think it’s a good thing if it’s hard for the government to just jump in.  If it’s important, the government has the resources to break most privacy systems that exist, they just want to have things set up so that it’s easier to do.  And if you make something easy to break, the government is not likely to be the only entity to take advantage of that.

Anyhow, I’m getting sidetracked.  So I have this project that is important to me both career-wise and in principle.  I have deadlines and people relying on me to do work, and frankly sometimes I can’t.  Sometimes my body is so broken that doing anything but lying in bed reading a novel I’ve already read a dozen times is impossible.  When things are bad, even a new novel – no matter how straightforward it is – is more than I can wrap my brain around.

When you work on chronic illness time, you have to have some give in your schedule.  Maybe you’re lucky and have a flex-time schedule that allows you to get your work done whenever you are in the condition to do it, whether it’s 9 AM or 2 PM or midnight.  Maybe you work few enough hours that you can rest enough between them to keep going.  All told, though, it’s hard.  It’s hard and it’s frustrating, and it makes you look like an unreliable flake to others.  It makes you feel like an unreliable flake.

For me, that inability to know how well I can keep my commitments is the hardest part.  It makes me question whether it’s worth it to finish law school, because I don’t know if anyone will be willing to hire me afterwards, or if I’ll be able to work for myself.  It is the one hint of bitterness for me in my fiance’s success at getting his job – the knowledge that such a job may never exist for me.  And it is only a hint; the vast majority of me is deeply happy for him.  And, er, also pleased that there will be money to buy shiny things, like fancy things to put in my hair and nice fiber for my spinning wheel and a silk robe to wrap myself in.  Okay, so I’m a hedonist and a glutton, but these are the small things that make me happy.  (If you’re curious about the nice hairthings, I’m going to be buying a hair fork from these guys – http://www.etsy.com/shop/grahtoestudio?ref=fp_ph_2&src=prvshp.  I am thinking about getting something custom – they had this lovely fork with a crescent moon at the top, and I think I want one of those in maple, which is pale and lovely.  Also, if you’re thinking about buying something from them, please tell me, because they have a referral program whereby I can get credit towards pretties.)

Ye gods this is a wandering entry.  I should know better than to write tired, which I am doing.  My block had this godawful block party today that involved a DJ playing music at rock-concert volume.  In the house with the air conditioner running and good earplugs in, I could still make out every word of every song.  It has left me with a bit of a headache, I’ll admit.  Also, I just went back on the medication I mentioned earlier, so it hasn’t had time to do me much good, which means that everything HURTS.

So this is what working on Chronic Illness time looks like: this is the time when your chronic illness makes it hard for you to write coherently and cohesively.  I know what I’ve written can be read, and the meaning is reasonably clear, but it rambles and forks like a bramblebush.  And why?  Because it’s hard to edit when you’re like this, and it’s harder still to make yourself stay on topic.  Obviously my mind in this state is pretty useless for researching for an article, much less trying to write anything!

So goodnight, everyone.  Hopefully, tomorrow will be a more brainful day.  Also, look for the announcement for the next Assistance Dog Blog Carnival here sometime before Friday.

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They almost look like fingers again!

One week on the new anti-inflammatory and my hands are starting to look like my hands again.  (I was going to say they were starting to look like normal hands again, but my hands are built so slim that they probably looked more normal when they were swollen!)

Thankfully the pain is down significantly in my joints.  My feet still start whining if I stand on them for more than a minute or two and my hands are quite displeased with how long I was typing this evening, but on the whole I am feeling better.  My hip is now spending more time settled properly than it is subluxed, and my knees only feel like someone took a baseball bat to them when I go up or down stairs.

It’s a real relief.  It doesn’t make all the maybes about what’s going on feel any better, but anyone who has lived with significant pain will tell you that being in severe pain that isn’t stopping is really terrible for your morale, especially when you don’t know why you hurt.  Either part – the uncertainty or the pain – is one hell of a lot easier without the other.  I wouldn’t say I’m optimistic at this point, but it would be fair to say I’m not feeling quite so glass-half-empty.

It’s not half full, it’s not half empty.  Right now, my glass is just…half.

I can live with that.

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