I’m alive! How about you?

It’s been an insane­ly long time since I gave this site its due. I sup­pose the real prob­lem with blog­ging about health prob­lems is that the peo­ple who know them best, by def­i­n­i­tion, have health prob­lems. I’d love to find some­one with whom to co-write this thing, so we could cov­er for each other!

Any­way, I had an insane­ly long bad peri­od but I’m feel­ing bet­ter now. One fac­tor in the improve­ment was stop­ping Effex­or XR, which I’d tak­en for years. I did­n’t actu­al­ly do that on purpose—It was due to an utter­ly irre­spon­si­ble doc­tor who refused to see me because of a screw-up in his office’s pro­ce­dures, not any­thing I’d done wrong. I had to just stop tak­ing it, cold turkey, which led to seizures and oth­er prob­lems. On the plus side, though, I’ve been far less drowsy and don’t need near­ly as many hours of sleep as I did before. (I’m actu­al­ly expe­ri­enc­ing some insom­nia, which isn’t good, but it’s a change.)

Any­way, my Social Secu­ri­ty dis­abil­i­ty claim was final­ly approved after over five years of wait­ing. They haven’t start­ed pay­ing any­thing yet, but that’s sup­posed to hap­pen Real Soon Now. I have to tell you, though—the Medicare thing is a con­fus­ing maze of choic­es, obvi­ous­ly designed by bureau­crats. You almost need to become a Medicare expert just to know what ben­e­fits are avail­able and how to get them!

For now, here’s a link to an arti­cle I found interesting:
Do Fibromyal­gia Pain Killers Make You a Like­ly Crime Victim?

I don’t agree with all of the advice. Peo­ple in Geor­gia have been arrest­ed for hav­ing legit­i­mate­ly pre­scribed med­ica­tions because the med­ica­tions weren’t in pre­scrip­tion con­tain­ers. It’s a real nui­sance to car­ry the bot­tles instead of just what you need, and it prob­a­bly does put us at greater risk for crime—but is it worth being arrest­ed? That’s a Catch-22.