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.

I’ve given some more thought to it, wondering if I should perhaps curtail my use of prednisone even more so than I have in the past and be extremely cautious when doing things like taking medication in general (doing it on a full stomach, for instance, or with food), but then I literally remember not being able to stop vomiting for three and a half days afraid that I was actually going to have to go to the emergency room because it would not stop and holding down water was a Herculean task that did not always end well. Luckily, all of this stopped just before it got to that point… but I continue to remember the pain that I was in. I realize now that my body may not be able to tolerate prednisone at all, what with these side effects that are not mild. I had a localized Staph infection on my leg that has almost completely gone away now, although some of that may have been due to blind luck because almost anyone else would have put me on IV antibiotics for the… severity of the wound that it left. And then I had an actual stomach infection that was unlike anything that I have ever experienced. I was nauseous. I was also in pain. It incapacitated me. It also frightened me, too.

And I know that I don’t ever want to be in pain like that, or suffer like that, any more.

The common denominator in both of these things was that I was on the “high” dose of prednisone, getting ready to taper down to a slightly lower dose when these things happened. They happened despite my best efforts to make them not happen. Prednisone can also lower the amount of stomach lining that you have, and in a susceptible person (I took NSAIDs with this after having eaten some food, one dose of Ibuprofen followed by a dose of aspirin as soon as I could for a migraine that I happened to be having… I wanted to see what my body’s reaction would be to them, and it did not disappoint in the bad way), that can be bad. In my case, it was bad, alright. And like I’ve already mentioned, it’s not something that I want to go through again.