Illness status

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Wow, yesterday I wasn’t doing so good. So much so that I forgot to actually git push that last entry, whoops.

Anyway. I slept for about 12 hours, and woke up feeling somewhat better. My cough is mostly cleared up, and the headache and fatigue that’s been affecting me for the past week or so is mostly gone as well.

I still took it easy, and also out of an abundance of caution I took advantage of QFC’s grocery delivery service, which was a pretty decent experience. Not something I’d do normally and not a thing I intend to keep on doing, but, y'know. It was helpful in this circumstance.

My refrigerator is well-stocked, at least, although I still don’t have much of an appetite. I’ve mostly been subsisting on crackers, seltzer, and cranberry juice.

I continue to test negative on at-home rapid tests. Given the symptoms I was experiencing as well as the timeline I have a hard time believing it wasn’t COVID, though. I know the at-home rapid tests only register for a certain viral load (which is pretty high with the current variants), and I’ve heard rumblings that the primer used for PCR tests is also very outdated at this point as well.

I absolutely credit the vaccine with keeping me from getting worse, though, and if you haven’t been vaccinated at this point and are able to be, please reconsider. If I hadn’t been vaccinated this would have definitely gone much worse for me, and also, please try to stop the spread, y'know?

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Test result: negative

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Today I got a PCR test. It came back negative.

I’m still sick with something, though, and the symptoms are to the letter COVID symptoms. I wonder how trustworthy PCR tests are these days.

Sick again

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I seem to be sick again. I’m not quite sure what it is, but I was exposed to COVID quite a lot two weeks ago (confirmed exposure at the office, probable unreported exposure at the hotel, not to mention all the other places where people have gone totally lax with distancing and face covering because I guess everyone’s given up on everything now) and a two-week incubation time is still not unheard of. Tests come back negative but apparently the current variants have a huge false-negative rate on the at-home tests.

Basically I’ve had a persistent headache and extreme fatigue (like, way more than usual for me, which is saying a lot) for the last week or so, and now I have a painful cough and it hurts to breathe sometimes. Robitussin and albuterol are helping, and I have a stash of promethazine if it comes down to it.

(Gosh I wish the war on opioids didn’t make promethazine so hard to come by…)

Even if what I have isn’t COVID-19, so many people around me are still getting it. This pandemic is far from over and I wish people would keep taking it seriously, and I wish people had been taking it seriously to begin with. Maybe if everyone had done their part to stamp it out, we wouldn’t be in this mess right now.

It sure would also be nice if Pfizer et al had actually kept their mRNA up to date like they said they would, and if the rapid tests were updated to cover new variants as they emerge. And if fucking Bill Gates hadn’t convinced the US government and WHO to not require vaccine stockpiles to be shared globally, so that maybe the breeding grounds for new variants might have not been quite so effective.

This was not a time for half measures.

Ugh re: Dextroamphetamine

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Stop me if you’ve heard this one…

Dextroamphetamine was working pretty well for me for a few days. Then last night I had some pretty bad insomnia accompanied with a major panic attack. So I think I’m going to hold off on it again and only using it 1-2 times a week, and not on adjacent days.

Why is my metabolism like this?

Probably for the best though; while on it I was getting super-productive again, and having pain flareups as a result. I need to find a good balancing point.

Fenofibrate

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Fenofibrate is affecting me the same awful way that Lipitor did, back in the day. If triglycerides are the problem underlying my pain, this medication doesn’t seem to be the answer.

Maybe I should try just eating nothing but salad for a month.

Pain, fatigue, and focus

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Two weeks since my last ketamine infusion and my anxiety is… present, again, and my chronic pain never went away at all but now I’m feeling a lot more aware of it.

I went back and tried Adderall again and it didn’t mess me up, although it also didn’t help me like it did the last time I tried it. But neither Adderall nor caffeine are messing with my blood pressure or increasing my anxiety, so I’ve reopened the conversation with my doctor regarding other meds for ADHD. In particular, I asked about Dexedrine and Desoxyn. Both of them seem promising at the dosages I’m looking at, although my insurance won’t cover Desoxyn (which is unsurprising, there was a TV series about it) so we’re trying Dexedrine first.

Regarding chronic pain, my doctor went over my chart and he noticed that we never really did anything about my high triglycerides, and then he had a thought: what if my high triglycerides are contributing to my fibro symptoms? Doing some cursory literature search found that it’s plausible, at least, so I’m also going to start on Fenofibrate to lower my triglycerides and hopefully get my body in some sort of balance there. He’s also ordered some more labwork to see if I have any gaping vitamin deficiencies.

Have I mentioned how much I cherish this doctor? Of all the doctors I’ve seen, this is the only one where I feel like he actually listens to me, doesn’t talk down to me, understands that I know my body and have done my reserach, and is willing to try things to attempt to treat these complex, deep-seated issues that have caused me problems for the past 25-odd years. It’s a lot easier to be patient as a patient when the healthcare provider treats me with respect like this.

He’s definitely a rare breed.

Sleep stuff, heart stuff, blood sugar blues

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After the first few days with the ring I was finding my sleep to be pretty awful, and I was noticing that I was waking up quite frequently. Some of it seems to be due to apnea coming and going, but last night while just lying in bed totally awake I started getting “please move” vibrations even though I was definitely breathing, and the ring said my SpO2 was a perfectly-healthy 98%.

But! My heart rate was dropping under 45, which was the configured notification for that.

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Better sleep through technology

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I’ve always had issues where I’ll stop breathing in the middle of the night, but I don’t snore. Sometimes I wake up gasping for air. I’ve suspected central sleep apnea for a long time.

Several years ago I had an in-home sleep study, where they hooked up an SpO2 meter to me and recorded it overnight. There were a number of drops throughout the night, indicative of apnea in general, and as a result I was provided a CPAP machine (on the assumption that it was obstructive, rather than central, apnea).

The CPAP machine didn’t really help much (if at all) and I kept trying to make it work over the next few years. Then due to a change in insurance I needed to get another study to get authorized for continuing the prescription, and they said that the CPAP machine wasn’t helpful for whatever my sleep issue was. I ended up selling it on the used market.

But I was still having apnea issues, and a lack of restful sleep.

Over the past few weeks it’s gotten especially bad, and after someone was evangelizing the Oura ring, I looked into continuous monitoring solutions. I’ve had a cheap finger monitor for years, which has been helpful for spot-checking but is uncomfortable to wear to bed, and also doesn’t record a log, making it less useful for diagnosing issues.

Oura is pretty expensive (and now requires a $6/month subscription plan) and doesn’t do continuous SpO2 monitoring (it only does momentary checks, similar to the current Apple Watch), but perusing other reviews and half-remembering a few videos I’d seen years ago, I eventually came across the Wellue O2ring, which is a continuous monitor which logs SpO2, heart rate, and movement all night long, and can also send a little vibration to your finger whenever the SpO2 drops below a configurable threshold.

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Osteopathy

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Today I had an appointment with an osteopath, which is basically a chiropractor but with a basis in actual medicine instead of weird quackery. It was an… interesting experience. An overall positive one, though.

She mostly worked on my neck and shoulders, which are feeling somewhat better, and also popped a couple of my vertebrae, which was a strange experience, but a good one. I’m not sure if it’s placebo or what but I definitely feel a lot better now than I did this morning, at least.

She encouraged me to keep seeing my current massage therapist (who I’ve found very helpful) and to wait a few days to see how I feel before scheduling another appointment with her. Unfortunately she (like most medical practitioners) is ridiculously overbooked and the next available appointment isn’t until February (I’d actually booked this one around two months ago, incidentally) but right now I’m at least feeling very encouraged.

It definitely hasn’t cured my pain but it at least feels way more manageable now.