I’m writing this on my phone while on a flight to Chicago. It’s almost scary how good I am at typing on this thing. We’re landing in an hour and I’m bored of reading Game of Thrones. Seems like as good of a time as any to write a blog post that’s, oh…2 months overdue?
We’re going to Pennsylvania to visit Dave’s family for Thanksgiving. And I have to approach this trip with some amount of trepidation because it marks the two year anniversary of when I got very sick and eventually became diagnosed with lupus. If you want to know the entire story, you’ll have to go back in time in this blog to read it. But here are the cliffs: had a cold, went to Pennsylvania for Thanksgiving, got sick with pneumonia, went home, got Scarlet fever, went to hospital, lupus diagnosis.
I spent most of my visit in bed sick with fever two years ago. At Thanksgiving dinner, I fell asleep while sitting with Dave’s parents on the couch. This was the first time I had ever met them, too! Talk about a bad first impression 😛 I’m happy to be visiting this week, but in a weird way I’m looking forward to it being over because in my mind, it will prove to me that I’m stronger than I was two years ago. Yes, I can go on a trip to visit my husband’s family and eat food and hang out with people like a normal human being!
As for my health, things seem to be going well. I feel infinitely better now that I’m off prednisone, and I usually have good energy and motivation. Of course I have some bad days where I’m inexplicably tired or exhausted, but they’re more rare than I would have thought. And since losing my hair last year and suffering liver toxicity, I’ve had no further complications from my medication.
With regards to my medication, however, I always have it in the back of my mind that I need to get off it. When I think about it too hard while taking it, I have a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach about the situation. I’ve always been that person who refused to take a Tylenol when I had a headache. I never took any medication ever. And yet here I am, taking these pills every day, pills that have warnings of them because they’re really bad for me. But they’re “necessary,” so I take them.
Are they necessary? I really don’t know. I’m pretty convinced that the pharmaceutical industry is a giant scam, but I’m too scared to cut myself off the meds cold turkey. I can’t describe to you how terrible it was in the month leading up to my diagnosis; I would do almost anything to avoid feeling that way again. So I keep taking the pills.
My acupuncturist is convinced that I don’t need them and has outright said, “If you trusted me, you would get off the drugs and I would show you how right I am.” When I tell my rheumatologist that I would like to get off them, she tells me that I can try to lower my dosage slowly, but I can’t do it all at once. So like the stupid gullible girl I am, I’ve been listening to my rheumatologist and cutting the dosage down slowly. Excruciatingly slowly. But I’ve enjoyed feeling better this year and I’m reluctant to give it up, even if it means I’m slowly killing myself with drugs. So I guess I’ll just keep going.
Anyway, that’s my long winded health update. Cliffs: I’m fine for now and have had no lupus complications this past year.
Life is busy as usual with Stack & Fade, DFS, and Twitch streaming. This coming week is going to be my first since August that I haven’t streamed at least four days, and it’s going to be weird! I definitely need the break, though. I’ve said it in the past but I’ll say it again: I didn’t realize how sick of a grind Twitch streaming is. Combine it with the website and DFS and it feels like I’m working all day every day with no break ever. I love all of it so much and I’m so happy to be doing it all. But yes, I need this break.
Where poker is concerned, I’ve been running really terribly since September. Not only that, games are very tough at the moment thanks to a high number of regs in the games at the moment. It’s really sucked, but I’m trying to hang tough and fight through it. It hasn’t all been bad, though. Here’s a video of me winning a $109 HU hyper MTT for the first time ever!
Thanks for reading. I’m gonna have to go back to the start of this post to reread it because to be honest, I have no clue what I said! Thanks for your company though, it’s been nice to take a break from my iPad grinding. And now, back to direwolves and dragons.
P.S. Regular viewers of my Twitch stream will be pleased to know that I heard several people ordering tomato juice during the beverage service.