My body wants to do prednisone. It is clearly whining for prednisone.

But I want to make antibodies against COVID-19, so I am going to delay prednisone for at least twelve more days. Given the kill count that COVID-19 has, it is in my best interest to make antibodies. If that means ball and chain to my nebulizer, taking Benadryl every four hours, I will do what I have to do. Due to my health problems, I am at particularly high risk of complications from COVID if I do manage to catch it. I would have gotten vaccinated sooner than I did, but I needed to be off of prednisone long enough to make this possible… I needed to be able to make antibodies to the shot. And of course my lungs are going to come in at the bottom of the ninth and try to fuck this up, but I’m not about to let them. Like I said, if I have to ball and chain myself to my nebulizer and take Benadryl every four hours, that will just be something that I have to do long enough to be able to make these antibodies. I’d rather not be totally defenseless against the real thing here.

I suppose I’ll see how this goes in the coming… oh, I know exactly when, twelve days. This will be fun.

I had an appointment with my wound care clinic last week where I was supposed to get my wounds examined, bandages changed, the whole nine yards… except that didn’t actually happen. Not like it was planned, anyway. I went to the building where my wound care clinic is and tried to let myself in for my appointment… to find out that I couldn’t actually let myself into the building because the doors were locked.

I tried to call the clinic itself and the one that’s a town over just to see if they would pick up, but no one would pick up. The sports rehab center one door down from the wound care clinic was nice enough to give me the number of the other clinic in this area, and she even gave me the hospital’s number so that I could call them. No one was that helpful, though. And no one knew why both wound care clinics in this area were closed. The hospital didn’t know why the wound care clinic(s, as we later found out) were closed. I called both of the hospitals that my wound care clinic is associated with, and they were equally confused. My primary care physician’s office was confused as well, given that I could walk a few doors down to get to them, that I did so, and that I explained the whole situation to them since they referred me. I didn’t find out until the next day that the medical director had died and that the clinic could not stay open seeing patients in the absence of a medical director. They will continue to send packages of bandages and wound-cleaning items to me in the interim, and they told me that they would call me once a new medical director had been hired and they could resume seeing patients. Will my wounds be healed by then, though? I suppose we’ll have to find that out…

So it seems to be set in stone that my insurance is going to continue to deny my pain clinic’s Botox request.

So the doctor that’s been managing my case decided to get an X-ray off of me to see if he could lobby my insurance with it and that I should receive steroid shots to the neck instead. I suppose I’ll be finding out about that soon, whether it’s by a letter sent in the mail letting me know that my doctor’s request was denied, or… I don’t know what. If I can’t have Botox treatments done, I suppose that steroid shots to the neck might be the next best thing. But knowing the luck I’ve had lately, insurance might try to deny that as well.

At the end of the day, I don’t really care as long as it ameliorates migraine pain or makes it more manageable, even if that treatment may have side effects. Right now, I’m reduced to wearing prescription sunglasses in the house to try and make migraine pain… less than, if that makes sense, and that makes navigating around my house a bit tricky. I do what I have to do to get through the day in general, though.