Up Early

The past 3 weeks has been a wild one. From my previous posts you’d know exactly what I’m talking about. Saturday morning was ketamine. I wanted to make sure up up early enough to get a dose of Dilaudid started before the session. Typically I’m asked to hold it 4 hours prior. Saturdays session isn’t the normal 12:30pm one, only one I could get was at 9:15am. Which I’ve never done such an early session.

I did get to finally go out and do something normal last night, and have dinner with friends. It felt good to get out of the house. When I got home, 8:30pm hit, I took my usual drawer full of meds, and I was out by 9:30. I fell asleep on the couch (as I always do lately), Anies woke me up to take me to bed. The fatigue and exhaustion I’ve been fighting all week has been doing this to me. It seems like it’s always the week before IVIG I just start to get worn out.

My body lately has still been fighting the usual mouth crap. When Dr. Hepworth referred me to this new guy, I’ve left 2-3 messages to get an appointment with no call back. So yesterday at work I called them again, luckily, someone picked up. No surprise, no referral was sent. So I contacted Hepworth’s office to leave the fax number so they could send over this referral so I could be seen.

Dr. Birela to my surprise is a Neurologist who specializes in facial pain with a viral focus. All of his reviews are great, so this got me somewhat excited to see this guy, hopefully it doesn’t take forever to get in to be seen. Having that week gap of no famciclovir really set me back, but I’ve been back on it again since early last week, and I’m starting to feel where I was before I ran out.

The game plan still hasn’t changed. Get on IV acyclovir to smash the HSV infection back into hiding. Mostly my lower portion of my face is what feels the most swollen. I would just love for one day to wake up, and this is all gone. I can resume some sort of “normalcy” in my life.

Ketamine was Saturday. It’s like an immediate light switch for pain. I walk in with nothing but pain, but I leave with no pain. It’s doing exactly what it’s intended for, and I couldn’t be more grateful for it. When we got home from my session, I went straight to the couch to just sleep off the other effects.

At around 7:30pm, I took all my meds early and crashed. The exhaustion has finally caught up to me. As you can see, I finally slept an entire night. Something I rarely get these days. This is only temporary unfortunately. The benefits of ketamine will slowly disappear. The pain for now is under control. I can actually sleep, for now.

Hopefully this will turn around my body and what it’s been doing lately with respect to pain. With being back on famciclovir, things are “better”. I can only hope that this new Dr can finally solve the remaining piece of the puzzle with respect to the swelling I feel along my jawline, all inside my inter lip, and cheeks. Let be honest. Seeing my WBC always 16-20, all my inflammation markers being high, after 2 weeks of famciclovir, it drops to 8, and the markers have gone done, significantly. Don’t know what more proof I need to have here.

The facial inflammation started after the implant debacle. That huge cold sore, and all the inflammation that started right after that was done. It just never went away. So yes. I’ve been dealing with this for a little over what, 5 years or so?

It’s just nice to get some sort of temporary relief from it. It’s nice that everything I’ve been complaining about since 2018, and even earlier is just being acknowledged and listened to. Finally. The fucked up part, is it took a heart attack to get everyone to pay attention, that’s where we are at with healthcare.

My friend Brad who had Prostrate cancer took 2 years for him to get help. His PSA levels were just “monitored”. These levels weren’t low either. It did take me several attempts to motivate Brad to push his doctors, but happily, he’s feeling better. His energy is back. He beat it. Had he waited another 6 months? I don’t think the outcome would’ve been what it is. I did take care of him during his recovery. It was quite clear between what the cancer did to him, and the lack of medical care was doing to his mental health. I’m just glad I could help pull him out of a place nobody should ever have to go to. Honestly, I saw Brad lose all hope. Again, I’m just glad I was able to push him in the right direction. It’s nice to see him back to “normal”. His energy levels, his attitude, demeanor, even his skin color is great. He has a follow up soon, and just seeing Brads progress, his PSA levels should be down considerably. That’s all I could ever hope for.

I made the final touches to Chads network over the past week, and luckily, I can say I’ve ridded him of Pegasus, forever. In that same token, it’s nice to have a great friend back too. His CPU on his new router, and all the logs tell me it’s finally gone. I will say this, Pegasus is easily THE WORST thing to date I’ve ever encountered. It causes so much damage. Whoever is controlling it from the other side, can make your life a living nightmare.

Again, it’s all about whatever I can do to help. Anyone who knows me, I’ll run into a burning building to save you. I’ll go to the ends of the earth to find you if you’re lost. As long as you’re a genuine person, and not someone who’s just in it to take whatever you can and run. Trust me. I’m guarded when it comes to meeting new people. I can easily determine within a short amount of time which peg I put you on.

As for the “loss” of Zeus, Chad has helped me rebuild the server. I should’ve set the server up this way from the get go, but I didn’t have the money, nor the hardware to do it. Plex has been running like a champion. The only item left to address, is getting the storage moved to Zeus. Finally collapsing, and getting away from WOPR which is an aging WD PR4100. It’s done its job since 2018.

I’m looking forward to learning something new. It’s something that can help me keep my mind off of other things, more or less a distraction.

Coming up this week, it’s pain management, and Hepworth. That’s pretty much it for Dr visits. Friday, is IVIG. It will be interesting to see if my WBC has returned back to baseline. As the week off, spiked my WBC back up to 13. Based on how I’m feeling, I’m sure it’s < 9. I just need to make sure it’s going the way it needs to.

From a financial perspective. Things are slowly getting better. The last few donations enabled me to get rid of credit card 1 of 5.

This allows me to move focus to the REI card, Cabelas card, Costco card, and finally the United Card. This is the mountain that’s been the hardest to move. When you’re looking at interest rates of 23-28%. It’s hard to get those balances to move. I still have the two prosper loans, and the other loan to deal with. The first consolidation loan through prosper will be gone by next summer. The loan is at the point where 95% of the payment is finally all going towards the principle. Less than $8,500 to go. The payment on that loan is $700 a month. If I can get rid of that loan, maybe just get 1 more big loan to collapse all the debt to, then just focus on getting rid of everything all at once.

The donations helped me big time. I was only $100 in the good every month. I came THAT close. Doing the financial gymnastics over the years to financially survive this health nightmare has gotten me through. With my last hospital visit being last year, and no ER visits since, tells me I’m close to the end of all this. Just gotta get this swelling / infection gone from my face / neck / mouth, and we are good. I can just focus on recovery from both a health, and financial perspective.

If everything continues on this trajectory, by next summer, I should be able to financially breathe again. Actually put my 401k contribution back to where it was. Put money away for a house finally. Get back to where we were before all this started. It’s just going to take time, no more surprise health curveballs, and just continuing to chip away at debt.

I’ll write again soon.