Last year I was dealing with a sinus infection that took a long while to shake. Since I am immunosuppressed and since the wife and kid were still going out and about somewhat, I figured it was wise to sleep in the other room for quite a while. I probably slept in there from April to July, if not longer. At some point though, I ended up back in there.
Later in the summer if not early autumn, I woke up one morning to this. It may not look like much in that clip, but it was an aggressive twitch that lasted well after I got up and moved around.
Since then, it's happened off and on quite a bit, but getting more frequent as time goes on. Somewhere along the way it also started bring really off-the-charts intense muscle cramps.
My diet, exercise (or lack thereof), and medication routines have been pretty much the same for the last few years. However, in late 2019 I started dealing with what I determined to be called "transient aphasia", mentioned in the previous blog entry. When I sought medical attention for that, about 4 MRIs revealed some areas of interest in the white matter in my brain, and the report suggested a 6 month follow-up.
Well, after that, the whole COVID lockdown thing happened and I pretty much didn't leave the house for 9 of the 12 months of last year.
This twitching has me concerned enough that I decided last month that I should get an appointment with my primary care doctor. I finally went in to see her this last Friday and she said it was either a thyroid issue or that it was multiple sclerosis.
Fun.
The thyroid thing, she said, could be treated and I could expect a full recovery from it. That is, if that's what it was. Labs were drawn and I'm still waiting to receive the results.
If it's MS though, that's going to be a fun ride. She told me to go ahead and schedule with the neurologist I saw last year, as he was an expert with MS diagnosis and treatment. So today, I finally got through to the neurologist's office and have an appointment scheduled for the end of the month, the soonest they could fit me in.
I was just sitting here, about to go to bed, and all of a sudden my hand cramped up really hard. It held that way for about a minute, and has since been feeling really stiff, sore, and kinda crampy but not. I wanted to shout as loud as I could in pain, but the wife and kid are 10 feet from me, sound asleep, and I didn't want to disrupt them.
I suppose now that I've brought y'all up to speed on that, I should go medicate and get myself to bed.
Here's another post after a long tim(e) of nothing. I need to be better about these things.
Life has been hectic for me, even though nothing major has been going on. Work is incredibly busy, as usual, and this whole pandemic thing has everything feeling like an introvert's dream. In the past, I would have said that I'm an introvert, and that I like my solitude, but as I've aged and grown my family, I find that I'm not a full-tim(e) introvert. I need interaction, apparently.
It's not been made known to this view of my life (this blog) that I have been on a bit of a roller coaster with my health over the last 10 years or so. As some of you may know though, I have an auto immune disorder called Ankylosing Spondylitis (pronounced ang-ki-low-sing spon-duh-lie-tis). Very vaguely, it's a disorder that causes the body to identify soft tissues (like cartilage between joints) as broken bone, and the body responds by growing new bone there, leading to fused joints. Some people without AS will have surgery to have certain joints artificially fused, and in those cases it can give them great relief. For people with AS though, the fusion takes a long tim(e), and the partial fuse can cause great discomfort. Another thing about that partial fuse is that it's not as strong as actual bone, which means that certain things can cause it to crack or break.
Over the years, I've had a couple instances of a fuse cracking, and it's incredibly painful. I had one just the other day though, and I'm still dealing with the effects of it. It wasn't debilitating, but it really hurt, and it did this weird thing where the pain radiated down my leg, then up my back, over my shoulder, and into my chest. The way it happened though was I tried to shift my weight while I was standing to pop my left knee, but my right sacroilliac (SI) joint popped instead, which it shouldn't have given the fusion.
I have tried to do some research to see what happens when you break a bone, in terms of enzymes or whatever being released into the blood stream, but I haven't been able to find anything that describes that. I posted on /r/ankylosingspondylitis about it, asking if anyone else has experienced the radiating pain, but the only response I really got was "Go to the hospital." Not helpful.
Aside from that, the medicine that I'm on to try and keep this autoimmune thing in check has been giving extra drama. These medicines are typically immunosuppressants, and that means that I get sick easier than most people. So far this year, I've dealt with:
- Transient Aphasia (sudden inability to read/write/speak)
- Sinus infections (no fewer than 3)
- Colds (2, I think)
On the other hand, there was a period of time from April to June when I was feeling great, and I got back to riding my bike. I put on something in the neighborhood of 100 miles (maybe more) during that period, then I got sick and it all came to a halt.
I've since been dealing with more joint pain, zero energy, and mild to moderate depression. I don't even feel well enough in general to make use of my 3d printer these days, though some of that has to do with needing to dry my filament.
I think that's all I have brain for right now. If you want to know more about any of this crap, let me know in the comments.