maintenance & inventory

Haven't done one of these in a while...

Amazingly, miraculously, my RA and fibromyalgia both are not bothering me lately. I sleep and wake up and do not feel as if I have been hit by a truck. It is a blessing to wake up that way.

My piriformis still tweaks me and it feels sore, but I have been more regular about doing my strengthening exercises and keeping my hips aligned, and that is going well. I saw a new physical therapist today, D, and she was great. She checked my alignment and said it was perfect, yay! And she examined my sore tailbone and discovered that the tiny muscles down there were spasming on the right side and pulling it out of alignment. About 15 minutes of work and I felt cured, although she warned me that it would bother me this evening, which of course it did, but I put ice on it and it helped. I'm scheduled for Friday morning again, and hopefully we'll make more progress. It is such a relief to get help with this problem! The drive to Disney next week is looking much more do-able. Whew!

I got another call yesterday from my endo's assistant, who apparently didn't know I had already got my labs last week. That's OK, I appreciated the chance to tell her that I'm still feeling wiped out, and having palpitations and chest pains, and could we please lower the Cytomel a bit? My endo actually called back and left me a message and said I could go down to 12.5, to try that for a week and let her know how I'm feeling. Since I'm almost out of Cytomel I've actually only been taking 10 for the past 2 days, but I'll go up to 12.5 when my prescription comes (should come tomorrow). Hopefully that will help.

The wired-and-tired feeling is better but still there. There is a difference between hyper fatigue and hypo fatigue. With hypo fatigue, it's impossible to move, at least for me. With hyper fatigue, I feel as if I just ran a marathon, but I'm still able to get past it and get things done. So that's good. I have this pathetic sense of accomplishment every day when I get dinner on the table. That's the big task of the day: feed everyone something for dinner! The timing is horrible for dinner because by early evening I just want to curl up and pass out, having run around all day on various errands etc. But it has been more than a week (maybe even 2!) since I announced to DH, "We're doing take-out tonight," because I couldn't manage dinner. I realize it's pathetic but I am still happy about it.

My biopsy sites range from forgotten to really annoying. (Reminder: three at one time is too many. Don't do that again!) The one on my leg is the one I forget about, which is bad because when it itches I scratch it, and that hurts. The one on my aeriole is a consistent minor stabbing pain, just a little ow ow ow that I have to block out all the time. The one on my axial fold (the front margin of my armpit) is the worst; it gets pulled and twisted all the time, and the smaller bandages don't stay on well as a result. The larger bandage stayed on but gave me my adhesive-rash, and now that's bothering me, too. Lovely. Can't wait until Monday to get these stitches out!

You will be able to knock me over with a feather if any of these comes back as anything other than a compound nevus. I understand the need for caution in my case, but so far there really have not been any really scary things to biopsy in a very long time.

Last by not least, the thing that is bothering me the most is the return of the rapid-transit digestion. I'm sure this is related to my very low TSH. It doesn't matter what I eat, it all just goes through me rather quickly and unpleasantly, although if I eat junk that does make it worse. I'm not losing weight though, so I guess I shouldn't worry -- and I'll see if it abates when I step the Cytomel down.

I'm pretty functional, all in all. This is good timing because next week will be the big push, visitors and CA and DS1's First Communion. Then I have a week to recover before starting prep for my first follow-up scan. I do have that impending-doom feeling -- I'm just starting to get my act together, hopefully I won't need more surgery or anything, and I can continue this upward trend. I can't do anything about it so I'm trying not to think about it -- but I do have a very lumpy-feeling throat, and there are some firm and fixed nodes under my jaw, again... sigh.