This Week in My Life: Week 10 of 2016

The view from here:

baby pinecones

digging these early signs of life

afternoon sun peeking through the gloom

rainy day

MRI time
It was awesome. I love MRIs (for real, I know I'm weird).

hospital art

Steroids Day 1

Steroids Day 2

Steroids Day 3

On the steroids:

Today is my last of a 3-day course of oral steroids for this relapse. I very much prefer oral to the intravenous. I've done compounded versions in the past, but my current crappy insurance naturally won't cover it, so I'm taking 25 50mg Prednisone pills a day. They are the worst. Taking them with pudding helps.

I feel as awful as always when I'm on steroids, though I've forgotten how bad this level of awful actually is since it's been 8.5 years or so since I last took them. I even experienced quite a lot of vomiting on Day 1 this time, which was new. (Not right away after taking them, luckily, so they stayed down. It was about 14 hours afterwards.)

Pretty much no sleep. Killer headache. Irritability, though it seems like not as bad as in the past. Nausea.

The big bummer in this story, though, is that my left-side weakness has not improved at all yet. (Well, maybe a little bit, but it's still fairly bad.) It seems like symptoms improved pretty immediately in the past, so this is concerning.

I've also been having intermittent awful periods of vertigo, though this technically started a few days before the steroids, so I have to blame the MS itself, and not the steroids for this one. But horrible room-spinning doesn't help at all when I'm feeling this crappy from the drugs.

I really can't believe that I did this steroid thing around 7 times back in the day WHILE going to grad school full time and working as a teaching assistant and teaching a bunch of private lessons. How did I do that?

The car saga non-update:

The car saga update I mentioned last week (the return of the original problematic symptoms) doesn't really have an update yet. The problems haven't been happening consistently. Fairly bad sometimes, relatively nonexistent other times. And not all of the symptoms have returned. The most concerning of them aren't happening, which makes it at least drivable. So I've delayed doing anything about it, at least until the next paycheck.

What I made this week:

dollar bill origami camera!

What I read this week:

Not much of anything, sadly. Reading on steroids doesn't work that well. Started Divergent.