busybee

I finally have a disability hearing tomorrow morning. Feel free to send positive vibes, if you’re into such.

I had a long-overdue physical with my doctor last week, and after explaining my various struggles with fibromyalgia, long COVID, and suspected ME/CFS she put me on two new medications, Singulair, for the persistent shortness of breath, and Lyrica (pregabalin), for the chronic pain. I’ve only been on them for a few days but here’s some observations so far:

My breathing problems have cleared up quite a bit, in that I’m not randomly feeling short of breath when I’m just sitting on the couch. So far I haven’t noticed any of its many potential side effects, but I also theoretically shouldn’t be noticing any positive effects this soon either. I haven’t done any significant physical activity so I can’t yet tell whether it’s effective as a prophylactic against exercise-induced asthma (which is the main reason I’ve been told I should be on it for years).

I haven’t noticed any significant reduction in pain, but I did have a day of extreme drowsiness when I started the Lyrica. The drowsiness has already cleared up but I’m still having a bit of “finger no worky” problems at times, and I’m already having the major constipation that happened with gabapentin. Increasing my water intake is always a good idea as would be going back on docusate, although I don’t recall that helping with gabapentin.

I’m definitely feeling a bit dizzier than usual and won’t be driving at all until things settle down a bit. Fortunately there’s Lyft (sigh) and the bus for most of the places I need to go which aren’t in walking distance. I’ve been thinking about getting a cheap electric bike/cargo trike/scooter for grocery and short-distance travel purposes, and that might even be an overall better setup than owning a car anyway.

Also as of late my hypermobility has gotten a lot worse and I am pretty sure I do have some form of EDS (and not just some unspecified “hypermobility spectrum disorder”) after all. So, that’s fun.

My disability hearing is in two weeks and hopefully it goes better than the previous parts of the process. I’m not optimistic.

For a while I’ve been using monitoRSS to broadcast a bunch of RSS feeds to various Discord channels. However, they’ve cut back on the free tier’s capabilities, and the paid tiers are rather expensive. So, this pushed me into finally creating rss2discord, a self-hosted RSS posting bot which you can run from anywhere that you can run Python scripts.

Hopefully this is useful to someone else as well.

For now it’s pretty basic but I’ve got a bunch of ideas for improving it.