The latest chapters in my medical history, providing some account of why I’ve mostly been absent from these precincts since, roughly, the 4th of March. (I tried to conceal the gravity of my situation, but there was only so much I could do, given that the worst affliction prevented me from using my hands and feet for anything without extravagant soul-destroying pain, some of which I had to endure anyway just to manage the very basics of daily living.)
This was clearly yet another auto-immune condition, no doubt triggered by the latest change in my medications for these afflictions (the final one for some time to come), so that I had reason to hope that it would afflict me for some period of time before passing away, as had the industrial-strength narcolepsy and the spontaneous tremors (reported on here in earlier postings.)
There was some relief available through what I understood at the time to be an independent affliction, a need for vast amounts of sleep (11 to 14 hours a day, in chunks throughout the day), which I understood to be the need for sleep that goes along with having an infection. Whatever this is — it continues unabated; I’ve had 11.5 hours of sleep already today, and it’s just just short of 11 am — it’s not even slightly like narcolepsy, and I finally realized yesterday that it’s also not the sleep of infection (my recent lab tests showed no indicator of an infection, and, now that I can use my hands again to take my daily vitals, I see that I have no fever).
In fact, I can curl up in my recliner chair, wrapped in a comforter for warmth, and quickly and easily fall into a restorative sleep that takes me away from the joint pains and the electric pain from my damaged right ulnar nerve, and so on, awaking refreshed after an hour or two. So the sleep is a kind of gift; I can wait for it if I need to — it doesn’t overwhelm me — and it’s an aid in difficult times. It does, however, eat up an awful lot of my day.
Meanwhile, back in the days of the actual immune affliction. when the sleeping was a welcome respite from the unmanageable pain, during the 4 days from 4 through 7 March: my dreams were entirely taken up with nebulous, unfocused, and constantly shifting wisps of recollection about a particular comic strip, a familiar strip, everyone’s great favorite. I wanted to search for an exemplary strip to post about, but nothing about it would stay clear in my mind long enough. But the strip was fabulous, everyone knew that, with an adorable, funny central character who also was tremendously clever and possessed of great moral clarity, somehow, some way that I just couldn’t quite get a handle on.
The above is probably about as much as I’m going to be willing to say about the afflictions right now, but I’d like to try to talk about that nebulous dream world over those four days. In a separate posting, to come as I try to get my life back together again.
