It’s that time again.

I bought a calendar for the last four months of this year, and I bought a planner because I need one.

I am also continuing to stay off of prednisone for Reasons™, and since I’m not on prednisone, NSAIDs are not even an option. But my body has made it increasingly clearer that it can no longer tolerate prednisone, so I have basically relegated it to “only if I could actually die” after giving it some more thought. And I mean that literally, although the ideal would be simply never to need it again because other workarounds are in place. Right now, I am continuing to deal with the fact that various wounds of mine — places where I’ve been pinched by Bub during meltdowns, shaving nicks — are not healing, not like they should, nowhere near.

These aren’t small things, either, like “I gained some weight from being on it,” or “my appetite increased while I was on it”. These are the fact that even superficial wounds do not correctly heal while I am on prednisone or for awhile afterward, so I always seem to be in some state of flux as it relates to wounds not healing like they would if the last time I’d taken prednisone was… say, more than a year ago. There was the Staph infection that I managed to contract on one leg, beginning to pass it off to the other leg by reason of no more than their proximity to each other and the level of immunosuppression that I had at the time. And there, last but not least (for now, anyway) was the stomach infection that I had that was easily the worst illness of my life… and I’ve been sick many times over my life, so I feel like I can honestly actually say that. The level of nausea and vomiting that came with that was far worse than any other infection, even those that themselves have caused nausea and vomiting. And that should say a lot, comparing infections like that.

As I’ve mentioned, prednisone was great while it lasted at doses appropriate to my diagnoses.

But it isn’t great any more, so I’m going to attempt to stay off of it with far more aggressiveness now.