This one’s heavy on health-related stuff, just so ya know…
A month or two ago, I started to feel…old. “Old” as in “I’ve aged 10 years over the last month.” Getting out of cars has been difficult and painful. All my joints hurt. My mental focus has been lousy. I stopped reading on the train. I’ve been consuming caffeine at an alarming rate but, even doing that, my energy is still absurdly low. What the heck is going on?
I came across one of those click-bait articles the other day, this one listing medicines that it is dangerous to take for long periods of time. One of ‘em was Prednisone. Now, I have not been taking Prednisone because my doctor gives me a horrified look when I even suggest it, but I was on a low-potency steroid for about four straight years. I looked over the symptoms of going cold-turkey off of steroids and, yup, that’s me!
Nicole put it perfectly: It’s like I’ve been swimming for the last four years and now suddenly my body has to support its own weight. It’s really obvious in retrospect, but with my brain in “just a piece of fluff between the ears” mode, it wasn’t obvious at all to me. I just felt like I was declining which is a pretty lousy way to feel.
I’ll be mentioning this to my doctors and to the folks who are providing this nifty experimental treatment I’m on because they may have some good ideas. Plus, self-diagnosis is notoriously unreliable and I could be dead wrong. I don’t think I am, though.
So….how to fight it? Pending my doctor’s advice, then the goal is to fight through some of it. Get back to reading, finish the 3 songs and 1 remix I’m working on, but also try to go a little easy on the body. Low-impact aerobics and stuff. I’ll be ok. My enemy has a face now (even if I’ve drawn it badly), and I can fight that. It beats feeling like I’m just withering and not knowing why. I got this. Nicole won’t let it be otherwise.
-RK