Amazeballs

I feel fabulous on progesterone.

Fucking amazing.

I have no idea what will happen next. If this is the end of the sick that has plagued me for over two years or if there's some other cliff for me to trip and fall over.

Too many times I've been optimistic only to have things go breathtakingly backwards.

But OMG I hope this never ends.

It's not without some problems. First, life without progesterone sucks. It's horrible when I have to stop it. I hope that evens out with time, otherwise I'm going to be incapacitated by fatigue one week out of every month.

I also have acne everywhere. I am not sure if it's the progesterone or something else. I've taken progesterone before to maintain my pregnancy (also felt fabulous then, hmmmm a clue!) and did not have acne so why it's acting up now, I have no idea. Maybe it's because I'm not on the pill anymore?

Or maybe the progesterone has enabled a hormonal shift that allows the PCOS to be more of a PITA than it ever was? I don't know.

I do know I'm doing more than I ever have.

Yesterday, I grocery shopped, cleaned the house, hosted a large party and went for a 2.5 mile walk. At no time did I feel weak or faded. That's a new personal best for me.

Please don't let it end.

On the Hippie Side

I went to a talk on medicinal eating given by a local herbalist turned MD. Coincidentally, they are involved in the cultural shamanic tradition I was associated with via my parent's marriage into a rather elite, whack-a-doo family. (Yes, there are jet-set shamans out there. At least one.)

I can't tell if that's a good or bad sign.

However, the last pulmo was also involved with this culture and they were fabulous. So it could be good.

I'm a little superstitious at times, in case you haven't noticed. Always trying to read the tea leaves.

And yes, I had a strange childhood. Shrunken heads in the linen closet and all that jazz. Christian minister on one side and indigenous shaman with a PhD on the other. Psychedelic.

So, while I disagree with this alternative MD's advocacy of vegan raw foodism and they don't like low carb, it might be interesting to see what they have to say about my situation.

Maybe there's an herb for that.

PS: Feeling better today although the asthma is all over the place for some reason. I had to break out the albuterol even.

Am I There Yet?

Things are chugging along. Yesterday, I thought I would lose the whole week to fatigue, but I perked up enough to go for a walk last night.

The hubby is mad at me because I had a doctor's appointment and failed to mention my knee. Which was attacked by a random piece of furniture as I innocently walked by, minding my own business.

No one reading this is surprised, right? It's a theme. Just like every car I've ever owned has a cracked windshield. I bang my knees around like they owe me money and I'm the mob boss looking to collect.

What makes this time different is, it was my good knee and it looked deformed--through my jeans even--for a good 24 hours. Basically, I gave my one functioning knee a rather large goose egg.

But it felt better the next day, even if it was a strange purple color. So I didn't mention it and hubby got mad.

Which is funny to me because this is the guy who refuses to have a primary care doc and does all his health care the expensive Urgent Care way.

The doctor's visit was routine, just adjusting some medications and getting refills, but the adrenal stuff came up.

I was told again I had unusual presentation, to which I wish I had said 'not according to all the adrenal patients I talk to. I'm actually adrenal pretty much the same way all the other adrenal patients are adrenal, maybe ACTH testing is useless unless you're at total failure, maybe medicine needs to adjust the parameters because I do know I'm not the only patient like me around who is under served by medicine's ideas of adrenal problems.' But I didn't have my wits about me.

I did spend a lot of time trying to explain how I can't exercise. First, there's the two weeks on, one month off dealing with sick (mine or others) pattern, which is extremely frustrating. Then there's the 'exercise still tires me out' pattern and the 'if I do all the cooking cleaning working, then I find I don't have much energy left for exercise' sequence.

Oh, and let's not forget, 'I f*cked up my knee doing nothing in particular and need 8 weeks for it to heal.'

When the adrenals were acute, I could do ONE thing a day. Just one and that was it. Now I can do something like ten things a day, but after that, forget it. While I am much better and functioning at a near normal level, I still run out of steam.

I am surprised to be typing that because I had such great resiliency last month that I really thought it was just onward, up to the moon, but no, it's not. It's more up and down. I can still exceed my available energy and I have a tendency to over do things when I feel good. Hopefully I will leave this all behind someday and not have to worry if everything I do is going to come back to haunt me.

At least we got the stomach flu out of the way, right?

A Really Long Update--Grab a Cup of Coffee

Hi. I'm alive. You?

Sick is not the reason for my long silence. I'm sure at least one person was worried and I didn't mean to leave anyone hanging.

Here's what happened...The writing started to do really really really well. As in averaging four star reviews, ranking in the top 100 on Amazon and providing real income and then...Amazon filtered my book out of their search results. Did you know they do that? And don't tell anyone? Not even the author? I found out only because I obsessively watched the meteoric rise of my book and noticed its subsequent disappearance.

They have a bit of history of banning books with filtering. A few years ago, one single employee (so Amazon says) filtered all the GLBT books and hid them from consumers. That filtering has been corrected, or so they say, there's no actual way for consumers to tell if search results are pulled from the entire database or not because Amazon doesn't tell anyone anything.

However, apparently my book is dangerous or too salacious or something and it was filtered. Amazon won't tell me why, of course.

Hello overnight loss of income. Hello despair. Hello trying to appeal my case with Amazon only to find they are staffed with people who make poop eating monkeys look like geniuses.

So anyway, that has been all consuming. I can take a book that doesn't sell--I have some of those. They sell maybe 5 copies a month, no biggie. However, I am not so gracious when a book, poised to break out in a big way, is destroyed on a corporate whim and then said corporation can't even communicate with me about the situation intelligently. It's like winning the lottery and your worst frenemy sets the ticket on fire 'just because'.

Can you believe I have a contractual relationship with a company like that?

As for the cold I had, it was very light. The whole thing was weird, it was like being half sick, half well for a week. I did two days of 5mg and that was all I needed.

I started exercising again this week, although I don't know why I bother. When was the last time I exercised for more than two weeks in a row? 1990 probably and that was back when they didn't have any fancy asthma inhalers.

At this point I half think I should give up on exercise. I don't have the health for consistency and are there any benefits from intermittent work outs? Or just risk of injury?

I won't give up though, just because I like to be active when I feel well, but I'm pretty demoralized. The adrenals don't help. They still tank a bit too with exercise. I generally recover in an hour or two, but man am I tired until my system kicks in, it makes it hard to gird myself mentally to do battle with both my constant de-conditioned state and the lag in the HPA axis. Every time I get somewhere, my health pulls the elliptical out from under me. I fantasize about a year of doing squats on a regular schedule.

I also dream of a boring life without broken ribs, adrenal problems, book banning etc... I really wish my biggest problem was boredom. Wouldn't that be relaxing?

The slowest moving stomach flu on earth is still working it's way through preschool. There are only 10 kids in the toddler's class, which says something about how slow moving this bug is. We are on week six of someone puking at preschool, the latest victim was hit today during art.

The toddler was discharged from physical therapy. I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, we've decreased the falling by about 80%. On the other, she's so clumsy, her core is weak, she's just not as strong as she should be. Like I told the OT today, she hurt herself twice this morning before breakfast out of sheer clumsiness. (OT will likely continue until she starts kindergarten.)

The House of Sick and Well

First, thanks for all the comments. Sorry to be so quiet, just crazy to the max over here.

I am doing well. I saw the endo and I've been discharged unless things suddenly slide backwards, which, you know, is actually possible and scares the shit out of me. But I was glad to leave a doctor's office on an optimistic note for once.

The endo agrees that I will need to stress dose for illness and that I may have to play exercise by ear, but the fact that my system now shows some ability to stabilize itself is good. I didn't have that ability even last summer when I stopped steroids and was supposedly 'cured', so this is good progress and took nine months.

Damn, just counted that out. Kind of slow, no?

Anyway, onward and upward. I just hope my endo has learned as much as I have about this adrenal shiznit.

I did get them to laugh. They had tested my thyroid last visit and when they said the results were normal, I snorted and said, "Of course, thyroid would be too normal and easy."

Doesn't seem so funny when I write it out, but I believe that if I can make someone laugh, we'll get along okay.

The toddler is sick and managed to get us all worried last night when she bloomed a huge red... hive? on her cheek. Pink eye came with a nasty cold for her and she's not getting better, just morphing into different kinds of sick.

She stopped eating or caring about food on Saturday which, that never happens. Whether she actually eats anything or not is immaterial, this kid bugs me for food like she's part labrador retriever. Half the time she doesn't even eat it. So I notice when she's not nagging me about lunch two hours early.

I flirted with that cold a lot myself and was quite adrenal on Saturday, but decided not to take steroids unless I got worse. I wheezed a bit. Hacked a bit and now seem fine? So a win for my immune system.

Other than that, I'm good. Toddler is adorable. OMG. She kills us. She is so bossy and funny right now. I keep forgetting to write down all her best lines to preserve them for posterity. We're so senile, we have pillow talk about how cute and funny she is before we go to sleep, but neither of us can remember what she actually said.

Writing has been interesting. I am making money and I continue to work furiously to position myself to make more. However, whenever individuals make any serious money online, corporate interests move in to seize the pie. There's a lot of market consolidation now, which is resulting in fewer avenues of distribution and less opportunity for independent writers.

Big Business realized we could take their space on best seller lists and get our own movie deals (not me, others) and they have made a series of competitive strikes the last few weeks. I think they thought that their eye for quality was so precise that independent authors were surely all dreck and a non issue in terms of competition. To their surprise, they've missed quite a few gems and are getting spanked online.

Having observed this business pattern before, I would say that the golden era of being an independent author is dimming. If you were toying with the idea, don't wait too much longer.

I Lived!

I'm better. Sick for most of the weekend. It must be food poisoning because no one else is sick. I thought for sure this was IT though as the preschool has been working through the stomach flu in slow motion.

For about month someone has been out with the pukes or sitting in the hallway with a trash can waiting for their parents to pick them up. So we were kind of due for a demonic GI possession.

Anyway, the cool thing was I was able to exercise Sunday even though I was still symptomatic that morning. It's really amazing to have the ability to 'bounce' to not crash and burn with every little thing.

Also, by the way, we never got lice, but guess what? Once you start looking for nits, you never stop. Wow. The paranoia. Huge.

The Next Stage

So Sunday I woke up to full body aches and I was a little nervous. My morning elliptical work out was awful. I was tired and I just couldn't get myself going. Despite everything I've written here, I did not take steroids.

But it was okay. I got a little more tired after the work out, but it passed in a couple hours.

Then I took a delicious nap because we had agreed on a lazy Sunday after church.

And did another Zumba workout.

All without steroids.

We'll see how it all pans out, but I think I'm transitioning to the next stage where I may not need to stress dose for exercise anymore. Illness remains to be seen.

A couple things have changed in my body's status quo:

1. I don't get the 'adrenal pain' so much anymore. It used to be almost constant but now it's mostly gone. Medicine doesn't recognize this pain, but since it correlates so well with when I feel adrenal and now that I'm not so adrenal, I'm comfortable blaming it on the adrenals.

2.I can gain weight now. Not so much lose, but I have to be careful with what I eat. So far I'm maintaining, but I really have to watch the scale and remember my carb free pass is now gone. All those times I ate ice cream and cake and candy and didn't gain weight? Yeah, that's over.

I do still have issues with low appetite when I get run down and I have continued to have low immune symptoms after exercise, just not every work out.

As for baby shower gifts... yes gift cards are really awesome because, even though you put the entire store on your baby registry, there's always something you need that didn't know you needed until after the baby arrived. Plus, diapers are expensive. So are breastfeeding and formula feeding, those gift cards are great financial cushions.

My favorite gift was from work where they presented me with a $500 Target gift card that somehow lasted us a year. It was a huge help.

And,when in doubt, books. Babies need books. Tactile books. Classics like Cat in the Hat. Just books. Nobody buys babies books and it's a crying shame. At 7-8 weeks their vision is such that they like to look at the pictures and hearing mommy or daddy's voice? Is just gravy.

In case you wondered, I got them several books and then a few outfits in bigger sizes, because everyone gives you cute newborn outfits and then your baby has to go naked after their first big growth spurt (about five minutes after birth) until you can get some bigger clothes. Not that I know anything about that because I'm a perfect mother. Ha.