How embarrassing not to connect cause and effect in my mind, even when I gave a full rundown of this very long-term problem to my new primary care doc just three days ago. I feel like a right idiot. She was going through my medications list, asking why I was still taking an anti-viral drug after all these years. I told her we thought that getting mono in high school was the trigger that turned on my lupus once and for all, and I’d felt like I had been getting mono over and over throughout adulthood. When tested three years ago, my titers for Epstein-Barr virus were ridiculously high, and I’ve been on an anti-viral ever since. The couple times I tried to go without it, my muscles just flat out refused to twitch and I couldn’t do basic tasks. New doc said, well, maybe you should see an infectious disease specialist and try to go off those meds. And then I stopped thinking about it.
What did I complain about yesterday? The fact that I have been overwhelmingly fatigued, barely able to cross a room, much less function. My muscles can barely hold me up in a car. My brain has been too fried to put this extreme fatigue together with the fact that I failed to take any of my medications during the two roughest weeks of chemo, to include the anti-viral that makes my muscles work. You’re a doofus, Anne. Just because you’re treating the cancer doesn’t mean the lupus went away. Take your damned pills and shut up about being weak and tired.
I took the lupus drugs yesterday and today (the anti-malarial), along with vitamin D. It wasn’t until tonight that I grabbed the one that pushes back on EBV. Maybe in a day or two I’ll feel more like myself, just in time to set the house in order before the next round of chemo makes me sick. I’m on the clock now.
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