Since more and more hospitals are going back to doing only necessary surgery, the work-up for severe diastasis recti that I was undergoing seems to have to be shelved. Since I don’t intend on having any more children, it wouldn’t have been a significant bother for me to undergo surgery to correct it, and I could lower my dose of prednisone if needed such that it would be as safe as it was ever going to be — assuming, of course, that I ever took it again, which I don’t want to because my body has finally gotten to the point where it can no longer manage oral steroids without sometimes significant problem. I mean, if they do it at any point during this pandemic, they do it. I’d ideally like it to be done as soon as possible so that I can get it done and heal from it, but if it’s not safe to do because COVID-19 cases are once again climbing and we have a mutation out there that more people are susceptible to… then I’ll wait. Even though I won’t like it…

And the saddest thing of all is that this could have been picked up on years earlier than it was even noticed.

The last time that I wrote about prednisone it was in the context of… not wanting to take it again due to severe side effects, but then I was presented with the opportunity to single-dose myself at infrequent intervals (no more than two consecutive days) if that was something that I wanted to attempt. Knowing that prednisone has significantly helped with migraine pain and moderately helps out with symptoms of bronchial asthma that are severe enough to warrant consideration of its use, I wanted to give it one more try before I gave up on it. And for awhile, this seemed like something that would work. It allowed the bad side effects of prednisone that I need to avoid to become balanced, or more manageable, while letting me experience some of the effects of prednisone that we wanted to see happen… but that didn’t last forever.

Or for even that long at all. Comparatively speaking it wasn’t even that long.

Even on the lowest possible doses of prednisone not taken every single day but only as needed, I was still getting sick and having side effects bad enough to make the medication intolerable. In spite of lowering the dose and decreasing the frequency, I was still coming down with more frequent opportunistic infections than I should have been, and this is said as it should simultaneously be taken into consideration that I have been taking oral steroids as needed since 2012. I know how important it is to stay clean, to frequently wash your hands, to mask up and not to get too close to people when it can be avoided, and I was expertly juggling these requirements until prednisone became too much for my system to take at any regimen. As far as decreasing migraine pain goes, I can voice these concerns in the context that this may very well actually open the doors for me to be prescribed stronger pain medication. Triptans do not work for the specific type of migraine that I most frequently, almost always suffer from, and Fioricet was only still tolerable when taken with prednisone as needed for the “worst” of those migraines. As far as symptoms of bronchial asthma go, I can just present to urgent care or the emergency room more liberally in lieu of starting the prednisone that… now can not be started because of all of the side effects that it is giving me even at the lowest possible doses. By presenting early enough in an exacerbation, especially to the emergency room, I can be given other medications that do not have these same risks. It may well be that I eventually have to abstain from taking steroids at all. And I mean, they were useful for awhile, so this will suck, especially as time passes.