More Medical Drama

Wednesday, March 28, 2018

Written by Kodi Wolf at 2:57 PM

Sorry I'm so late with my monthly post. The medical drama just hasn't let up, so in order to keep up with my writing, I put everything else on the backburner, including this site and all the updates I had planned. Anyway, even though my Progress Reports page doesn't show that I've been writing every day (which I have), here are my stats.

My total word count for February was 16,149, which averages out to 577 words per day. My lowest words per day was 135 and my highest was 1,753.

So in my last post, I mentioned I passed a kidney stone in August and then again in December. Then I had lithotripsy to blast the remaining stones in January.

Well, February was inversion therapy month. I had to drink a ton of water (90-125oz/day) and then get my body into an inverted position (head down, ass up) for 30 minutes 2-3 times a day. I barely managed once a day by the second week because of how exhausting it was for my muscles to maintain that position, but at my follow-up with my urologist, he said I was all clear, so apparently I did enough. (Yay!)

Then came March and I got shingles.

In case you don't know (I didn't), shingles is the same virus as chicken pox. Once you've had chicken pox, the virus can enter your nervous system and continue to lie dormant inside you for years.

If for some reason it becomes active again (lowered immune system), you end up with shingles, which usually presents as a patch of blisters on only one side of your body that are incredibly painful and itchy. Shingles is also contagious, but it will only cause chicken pox if the recipient hasn't had it, not shingles.

After doing a little research, I think it's likely that the lithotripsy procedure and the toll the inversion therapy took on my body probably brought it on. The worst part was that it was on my face and ended up causing my left eye to swell completely shut for several days.

Because it affected my eye, I saw an ophthalmologist who prescribed some anti-bacterial eye ointment and as many drops as I could put in, since I couldn't blink (that's very bad for your eyes). My follow-up with him showed I had no damage from the shingles virus on my cornea, which was a real concern because I'm more susceptible due to already having cornea dystrophy.

Unfortunately, because the virus lives in your nerves and it specifically affected my ocular cranial nerves, I've been having eye pain that might possibly never go away. It's called postherpetic neuralgia (yay, another -algia to go with my fibromyalgia). I'm taking neurontin for a month and dosing on anti-inflammatories like I never have before in an attempt to lessen the long-term effects, but I won't really know if the pain is permanent for probably months.

What I have noticed is this weird tingling feeling in my left eyebrow that feels like a wisp of hair is being dragged across it every now and then. That side of my forehead and going up into my hair is a tad numb as well, so I probably do have some nerve damage. There's also what looks like some pink scarring on my forehead where the majority of the blisters were, but it's too soon to tell if that'll fade or not. I can still see, though, so that's all I really care about.

So, that's been my year so far.

On the bright side, I've been getting my writing done every day and I've even been maintaining a daily average above 500 words, which is one of my goals for the year.

March has actually been a pretty good writing month, but I'll talk more about that in next month's post, since this one has gotten so long.

Now I'm off to get my writing done for the day (I don't count these blog posts because they don't specifically give me any progress on my stories).