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When I kept my last appointment with the rheumatologist he prescribed me a new medicine to replace the self-injection type that didn't work out so good, but he also prescribed me an old medicine, prednisone, for which I was and am grateful. It reduces the perpetual pain of my joints to barely noticeable.
In his office at the VA Hospital in Durham he gave me the choice of going to the pharmacy directly and wait for the prescriptions to be filled or to have the pharmacy to mail them to me as usual. I arrogantly chose the latter to delay the goodness for a while, and possibly appreciate it more when I did get it. It made sense to me that it would get here before the weekend, but it did not.
The prednisone arrived yesterday afternoon about 4:30 p.m., and by five o'clock I'd made sure four of the 5 mg tablets were in my belly dissolving away and causing me to feel fairly human again by the time I went to bed. Of all the drugs I've take, legal or otherwise, prednisone, some kind of steroid, has offered me the most joy.
Joy? Yeah. It's the starting point which the relief begins that causes me to choose "joy" as a descriptor. I've been going downhill for around four months as fair as the pain in my body has been concerned. Up until last night, and especially for the last week or so, I've been experiencing a pain in both my big toes, and I know from the descriptions I'm only familiar with via reading that it's gout. This doesn't bode well.
Fortunately, this morning, after a pretty restful sleep, a lot of the pain I've been experiencing is fading. I can actually close my still swollen fingers into sort of a fist, the gout in my feet has dissipated. The constant pain in my neck and shoulders has taken a hiatus to some degree, and I'll take four more pills today and then tomorrow and the next day, and then reduce to three tablets a day,
Unfortunately, the same medicine that offers me this relief is also killing me. With steroids, there is a lotta relief, but with the absolute knowledge that I can only use it for just so long, then I have to stop using it for an infuriatingly long time before I can employ a new series of it, and when that happens, all the not-so-wonderful stuff returns full force if not worse. What a drag man.
If dying from what steroids do to one's body wasn't such a horror show, and I could get an endless supply of prednisone I'd keep taking it until I croaked. By the time I'm driven to the level of desperation, however, I'll probably be so crippled I won't be able to open the bottle by myself and put the pills in my body. I'll probably die from starvation.
I played the scales on my digital piano twice last night intentionally, just because I could do it more comfortably. The scales are about all I play on the piano or practically all the music I play any more. Sometimes I play rhythm guitar as background for Rainey to play his mandolin and violin, but that's gotten to be a fairly rare event.
I taught myself to play the scales from the teaching material I found on the internet. It took what seemed like forever to learn to play the scales with the correct fingering, and after about a year of that I began to concentrate of speeding things up. I'm still not playing the scales very fast, and my medical condition can be troublesome for me to hit the right note physically every time, but I'm very pleased I learned to do it before the eternal adema and stiffness because a 7/24 fact of life for me. Well, except when I got some prednisone, like now.... YIPPEE!!!!
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I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
