New Blog!

Okay, so I'm new to Blogspot but I figured I'd branch out a little from LiveJournal. I've already got three of them, anyway, so why not?

This blog, "A Something-Awful Day," is where I will post information about my health problems and my adventures with various medications. I think I will prefer to keep this more serious stuff out my usual journal.

I have fibromyalgia. I could try for that whole "you have the disease, the disease does not have you" crap, but it's not true for me. Fibromyalgia has affected every single thing in my life. Nobody wants to be a sick person. I'll try to keep the drama down to a minimum because I recognize that I don't have a progressive or potentially fatal illness, just something that makes life difficult. I'll also try to keep the medical/pharmaceutical terminology to a minimum, but by now I know a lot of the terms so sometimes I forget that not everybody does.

In addition to fibromyalgia, I have a number of mystery ailments. Some of them are probably from being on medication, but some are just there. This past January I had my gallbladder removed after a specialized (and excruciatingly boring) test showed that the thing wasn't working. Usually this happened because the gallbladder is full of gallstones. After mine was removed and examined, I was diagnosed with biliary dyskinesia. That means that they don't know why my gallbladder stopped working. It didn't have any stones in it, it just decided to mutiny against the rest of my body. It won.

Currently I'm on a variety of medications and supplements.

• For fibromyalgia I take Savella (Milnacipran). I'm currently making the transition from 50mg twice daily to 100mg twice daily. Hopefully it will not cause side effects. 
• For morning nausea I take 40mg of Nexium at night.
• For Vitamin D deficiency I take 2000 IU of Vitamin D3 every day. That's five times the recommended daily value they use for those nutritional information panels on food products.
• For the hell of it, I take 1500mg a day of peppermint-flavored fish oil, because sometimes it helps fibromyalgia.

I have a few other things to take for occasional symptoms:

• Restoril (Temazepam), 15mg to help me sleep
• Ultracet (Tramadol-ADA), 37.5-325mg for pain
• Macrobid (Nitrofurantoin), which is an antibiotic, for self-diagnosable infections.

Soon I will get around to post an introduction to what fibromyalgia is...