A long overdue blog post

I’m really sorry that I haven’t had more time to do this lately, as things seem to be spinning back out of control again.  I’m back out on short term disability again…  Things have gotten worse with my face and my neck.

For starters, I’ve lost 2 more teeth.  The upper tooth (#15) was removed about 2 weeks ago, and was infected.  About a week later, the burning mouth and jaw pain continued, so I removed the last tooth on the bottom (#23).

Things are still not better.  The swallowing issues I was having are back again, but I think things are starting to align.  For the past few months I have been fighting an issue with my left parotid gland, which is the salivary gland that sits in front of your ear.  I’ve noticed a pattern where the pain, burning sensations, numbness, and overall nasty feeling comes right after I eat, or if my saliva turns on.  I have been having this issue even before the surgery, and my ENT has been trying to fix it with antibiotics, however, its been almost 7 weeks of antibiotics…  I’ve been on Cefdin, Doxycycline, Clindamycin….  Nothing is working…  I had a CT of my face, which confirmed an enlarged parotid gland.  I see my ENT at 9:20am today to figure out what we should do.  I am hoping that we just remove it at this point since its causing so many damn problems.

On the immunology / CVID front, my immune system is slowly getting better.  I met with my immunologist yesterday, and he is upping my IVIg to 500mL (was 400mL previously) to help combat whatever the hell is going on with my neck/face.  He also wrote up bloodwork for CBC/Meta, as well as looking for Mumps, and Candidia.

My attitude as of late has been pretty shitty.  I cannot catch a break.  It feels like this is my life now.  I just want this to be over…. I’ve been dealing with this for way too long.

My infusion is today, hopefully after that we can do something about this parotid thing sooner, rather than later.  Sorry for the short post, but today will be a busy day.  Hopefully over the weekend I can write more about the past few weeks events…