LAST EDITED ON Mar-05-18 AT 00:56 AM (EST)
 
Actually a couple of things are not ideal.

1) The ISP providing my home DSL service seems to have forgotten how to route traffic to this website. I can get to it from my phone, or (as I have done to post this) by using the phone as a wifi hotspot, but the house network can't see it. This has been going on for a week now and is annoying me, but not nearly as much as the other thing that has been going on for a week now, to wit

2) I've had a succession of sinus infections (or possibly just one that the first two rounds of antibiotics failed to knock all the way down) since December. Last weekend I finally started to feel like I was getting over it...

... and the fingers on my left hand started to go numb.

This has progressed over the course of the week, to the point where on Friday afternoon, my neurologist informed me that based on my description of the symptoms and their lack of response to the short course of oral steroid he'd prescribed on Monday, he's pretty sure I'm having my first full relapse since I was diagnosed with relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis in the summer of 2009.

Eight and three-quarter years between attacks is really pretty decent, but I think I could probably be forgiven for not regarding it as quite decent enough, particularly as the doctor went on to drop, almost casually, the further intel at the end of the conversation that he expects the condition, having reawakened fully, to remain active for "at least the next five to ten years." I'm supposed to have spent the weekend considering which of the other treatment options I want to try next, since the one I've been using since my diagnosis has now failed. I... haven't spent most of the weekend doing that, if I'm honest. I've mostly just been wallowing in self-pity, when I haven't been trying to distract myself by replaying Subnautica or helping my father build a new kitchen table. With one hand.

(Well, OK, to be fair, my left hand still works, I just... can't really feel what it's doing most of the time. Have you ever gotten super glue or model glue on your fingertips? You know how annoying that feels? Basically my whole hand feels like that. Actually, at this point most of the left side of my body feels like that. Including the ass cheek! More information than you wanted, I suspect.)

So, uh... anyway. If you've been wondering what happened to that burst of activity you saw around Christmastime, the answer is basically that. I've been sick for most of the time since then, and now, evidently, once my immune system finally got around to doing something about that, it got a little overexcited and started chewing on my white matter again. And, because this is the way RRMS works, we don't know when it's going to stop. Or really if it's going to stop, although statistically, in patients my age it usually does eventually. For a while.

Elon, stop showing off launching your toys into space and get on that robot body replacement thing already. Fuck's sake.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.