Jinxfexxor

Wellp, as usual, saying anything vaguely optimistic about a new medication has angered the side effect gods, as over the course of yesterday I noticed I was having progressively more trouble breathing and swallowing and a feeling of swelling in my throat, which is on the list of Effexor side effects to watch out for and to immediately contact your doctor about. So, I’m pausing the Effexor for now (hopefully having been on it for only three days at the lowest dose will minimize the withdrawal effects, ugh) and have sent a question to my doctor about it.

If dopamine regulation is so great, why doesn’t my brain just do it on its own?

Effexor

The only theory that anyone’s come up with for my vertigo issues that holds any weight is that they’re possibly vestibular migraines, so my neurologist put me on Effexor, which can help treat vestibular migraines.

It can also treat anxiety, fibromyalgia, and ADHD (which makes sense, as they’re all fundamentally dopamine dysregulation problems, and Effexor works primarily by regulating dopamine), so maybe this will be the magic bullet that helps me with everything. Several of my friends turn out to be taking it for their fibromyalgia and/or anxiety and they say it helps them somewhat, so, we’ll see.

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The agony of being

The last few days I’ve been having yet another awful chronic pain flareup. So it’s been one of those time periods when I kind of wish I didn’t have a body, or at least didn’t have to exist so much.

This time I don’t even know what brought it on, it just kind of came out of the blue, after a whole week of being too fatigued to do anything substantial.

I’m trying to finish up my remaining commitments for strawberry jam although everyone waiting for music from me is understanding and not in a huge rush. There’s one piece I want to get done today because the team is trying to wrap up development today but they also waited until the last minute to give me a specification for what they wanted so I’m not feeling too bad if I can’t get anything done for them, I guess.

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Music updates

My big fibromyalgia flare seems to have finally subsided, so I’m back to working on music, yay.

Right now I’m working on recording “Sunny Again” for Transitions. The Transitions version has ended up being somewhat more complicated than I was expecting, so this will take a while to get finished. But I really like the arrangement that I have, and I hope that I can pull it off.

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postponing the concert

I’m having a bad pain flareup and as much as I’d like to push through it and do the concert anyway, from experience I know that’ll just make things worse and I’m trying to get better at self-care and showing myself the same understanding I show others.

So, tentatively I’m planning on my next VR concert being on September 29, at 9 PM Pacific time, hosted on my VRChat group. And of course it’ll be streamed over on my Owncast. Here’s a Discord event link.

The great thing about performing virtually is that I don’t have to worry about venue booking. I can make my own rules for this and I don’t have to feel bad about the reality of my health.

💜

Taking a break from stuff

So yeah I’m deep in a pain flareup right now. I made sure that all of the critical bugs in bandcrash are, to my knowledge, fixed, but I just am not in a situation where I can really work on stuff right now due to a massive pain flareup.

I was just starting to work on some music for a game jam game and Novembeat but I don’t think that’s really in the cards for me this year.

And of course now that I’m in agony, suddenly a lot of folks want to interview me for engineering roles that I’d normally be very interested in, so, thanks for twisting the knife on that one.

At least choir is going pretty well and gives me stuff to look forward to.

Current goings-on

Do people ever read these things? Or do people just like knowing that I’m still alive? Either way here’s a “I’m still alive” post.

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Comic progress (or lack thereof)

I have two major comic series that I’d like to get back to:

  • Unity (no relation to the game engine): a long-form science fiction thing about an interstellar colony ship that’s lost its history, with the initial story being that of one of its scientists who has lost their history
  • Lewi: a young dragon is finding herself caught between the worlds of science and spirituality (and there’s also something much bigger going on in the background)

So, these two series are very dear to my heart and both of them have been on hiatus for a while. I would like them to not be on hiatus.

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The joys of being alive

So, yesterday I had my 6-month followup with the cardiologist regarding the heart-related stuff and got the usual litany of obnoxious hand-wringing around my labs (evne though they were now very out-of-date) and yet another lecture about lipids and triglycerides, which, yes, this is why I am seeing you. Meh.

Anyway, the upshot of this is that he did order new labs for me (which I have no issue with, of course, just with how he talked about ordering them), and this morning I figured I’d go get them done. And before doing them I figured I’d use my OTC blood glucose meter to get an idea of what to expect with the blood sugar results.

It came back with 296 mg/dL.

That is… high.

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