Posts Tagged ‘health’

Since I haven’t mentioned this in here yet…

As many of us thought (and feared) would happen, Roe v Wade was overruled, and abortion is no longer a constitutional right in the United States. Living in Texas, most of you can guess what our state governor thinks about that… although the current law, and trigger laws, still allow me to get an abortion if I get pregnant again — another pregnancy would risk “the life of the mother”, or my life, since my epilepsy is now that severe and I have periods in which I go apneic during my sleep for as little as a few seconds or as long as thirty to forty-five seconds (waking up from that is not fun because it feels like I’ve just got done running a sprint). If I get pregnant again and attempt to stay pregnant, the chances of me dying in my sleep from a nocturnal seizure are more than 30%… and I mean, they were never low to begin with, but research into nocturnal epilepsy as it relates to pregnancy has indicated that the two do not bode well together and it’s not something that I am ever going to attempt to chance. I think I’m going to discuss sterilization with my OB/GYN at my next Depo-Provera appointment and see what, if anything, I have to do to get the ball rolling on getting my tubes tied — the thing that was holding me back on that was, and is, the fact that I am immunosuppressed from the prednisone usage that I am still trying to stop, and no one wants to risk a keyhole infection that is likely going to be Staph. However, with the political climate, that risk is acceptable.

So many Republicans in this state are already chastising women about how they should “make better decisions” and “have self-control”, and it makes me so badly want to mention something here in this blog that some of you already know about, but I’ll get to that in time. (Let’s just say that I check my tracker.)

This is “never again becoming an option” fast.

I am still on prednisone because it could take up to a week for all remnants of Bactrim to leave my body, and when you’ve become badly allergic to the thing that you had to take… yeah. And I continue to take Benadryl as needed to decrease the likelihood that I continue to manifest allergic symptoms to this thing. Next week is shaping up to be a very fun week. The medication that caused this, that I don’t want to take any more, is the medication that I need to stop the effects of this because my immune system has recognized the Thing I Need as the Thing I’m Allergic To and decided to ramp shit up even worse. Somehow I actually expected this.

I can’t wait to be off of prednisone once this is done and over with and just stay off of it. Seriously…

Me: 0, Bactrim: not 0, is anyone really surprised?

Well, I am no longer allowed to take Bactrim for… well, any reason.

Prior to this, it was listed as a moderate allergy in my medical records because all it had caused was a headache and severe dryness of my nose and throat after my dose had to be raised adjusting for my weight as a child. Because this was so early in the process of taking it for an ear infection, I was taken off of it, put on something that I wasn’t allergic to and the allergy to it was noted in my files. However, since the Staph infection that I happened to… get on my skin was MRSA and I have a history of being immunocompromised, I told the local hospital that I would be willing to try Bactrim since it was the best suited for the problem that I had. I took every single dose of it with Benadryl as directed, but the headaches became severe migraines (which I had to medicate), and by the end of it, I had an antibiotic rash all over my face, chest, and upper stomach. For most antibiotics, late-onset rashes aren’t that big of a deal and you can finish the thing anyway without having to worry about an allergy. But in a history of someone already allergic to it — and it being a sulfa-based drug, meaning that antibiotic rashes at any stage in treatment are bad — this was… not good. At any rate, it then snowballed from there, and I got chills and a fever from the antibiotic. Putting myself back on prednisone out of sheer necessity at this point lowered the fever and reduced the rash, and forty-eight hours after that point I began to feel better. However, getting over something like this can take up to a full week for you to do, and now that I know that I am severely allergic to Bactrim this is what I expect.

Now I just have to see if this infection is actually gone, and these wounds actually heal, for our next trick.

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