Posts Tagged ‘health’

17
Mar
2020

Coronavirus pandemic and… not chill, much?

categories: personal; word count: 408 words

As of the time that I’m writing this, we have had two positive cases of coronavirus in my county. Both of them appear to be as a result of travelers coming back with it and then testing positive, and as soon as they realized that they might actually have it, they sought medical care and put themselves in quarantine. All of the school districts in this area announced on or around Sunday evening that they would extend their Spring Breaks for another week (for the ones that were on Spring Break from the 9th to the 13th), effectively granting another week of Spring Break from the 16th to the 20th. Some of the districts that are… a bit further away from here have chosen to go one week further out from that. The district that I am currently living in has not released any further word on that. But the state that I live in has suspended the requirement for standardized testing for all students that would normally be required to take it, as that would start to come up in a month or two. I do know that much. But they test the different students at different times depending on their grade levels, what the requirements are for each grade level, and whether or not they need to re-test to successfully “be passed up” to the next grade, so I’m wondering if this is on the heels of a bigger plan to “hunker down”, or if school for the rest of the scholastic year might actually be scrapped in the face of this.

Obviously (or, well, maybe not that obviously?), I’m in a “high risk” group, meaning that I would probably not be able to shrug off the coronavirus if I got it. I’m an asthmatic, and definitely not a mild one at that. I just came off of prednisone and am hoping that I can manage having shortened both the dose and duration of the burst that I finished taking. I may temporarily cease my inhaled steroid if we keep getting positive cases in this county, and especially if we get any in this city. So I need to take extra precautions to ensure that I do not catch this, especially if it does become extremely local, hope that others are prudent enough to do the same to protect individuals like me, and hope that I do not actually catch it. Because that would really suck…

12
Mar
2020

Our PS4’s external hard drive has finally arrived!

categories: consoles, personal; word count: 431 words

Now all I have to do is download the games that we had put into storage due to lack of space onto it, which will probably take… the better portion of a day, and we’ll have everything downloaded that we actually own. With where our PlayStation 4 is at in the house, it’s not particularly close to the router, even though we do have an extender now which has made download times better than they used to be in the past. So I am thankful for that, even though they have almost never been “lightning fast” or even extremely fast. Sigh…

I also found out that my optometrist does not currently take the Medicaid HMO that I had to switch over to, which means that for the sake of convenience and ensuring that I am able to see properly I had to find an optometrist around here that does, so I will be seeing them this week. Apparently they had been bought out by… someone else, something else, I don’t know, so they have to renew contracts with everyone, and I didn’t want to have to wait an extra several months to see if they would renew the contract that they had with my current Medicaid HMO, so a new optometrist it is, I suppose. At least I like my current glasses enough to keep those frames. In case Bub ever inadvertently headbutts me, we’ve already confirmed that they are durable!

Meanwhile, I continue to do poorly on the inhaled powder steroid that I am on for my asthma.

I suspect that “given enough time”, I will officially “fail” this, and be able to switch back to Pulmicort.

Being on powdered mometasone seems to be taking my lungs back to the days of… several years ago, almost seriously, when I was flaring a lot more frequently and severely and could literally walk through my house at a brisk pace (or to the mailbox and get the mail at that same brisk pace) and seriously get winded. Now I’m doing that as a result of having been on mometasone for nearly a month, adherent to the schedule of inhaling one powdered inhalation from the container twice daily. I don’t want to be back to this, but here we are. With any luck I can get placed back on Pulmicort. Seriously. It’s really ironic that the Wikipedia article for it states, “Specifically it is used to prevent rather than treat asthma attacks.”, because in me, it has actually been causing more of them lately, and this has coincided with me beginning this med regimen…

06
Mar
2020

Look what I bought Bub! Look at it! Look!

categories: personal, RPGs; word count: 312 words

I ordered Bub the ten-in-one Kingdom Hearts game that is coming out later this month because I found out that they were having a 70% off sale on… wait for it… a bundle that normally sells for $99, and with tax, I got it for just over $30. Friends, I call that one hell of a deal. I didn’t even have to think about that one. In my cart it went, and on our PlayStation 4 it went. Now, that drew attention to the almost chronic problem of us running out of hard drive space on our PlayStation 4, which I am attempting to rectify by way of having ordered an external hard drive to begin to store things on so that we do not have to play the “hard drive shuffle” that we have begun to play. I didn’t get an extremely large one, but I got one that suits our needs.

Meanwhile, switching my Medicaid HMO as a result of needing to keep all of my doctors in network (since one of them changed the hospital that he was affiliated to, which meant that one of the three Medicaid HMOs in my area was one that was… no longer in network with them) has caused me to need to switch the inhaled steroid that I have been on for maintenance to control my asthma to a new one, and this has not been fun. As the saying goes, “this has been widely regarded by the cosmos as a bad move,” or something to that effect. If I “fail” this medication, which I strongly suspect that I will, insurance will cover the medication that I was formerly on. It’s just a matter of getting to the point where my insurance will have seen me as “being on it long enough to have failed it”, will be satisfied with that, and will then let me switch back.

20
Feb
2020

Neurological medications that I am currently on.

categories: personal; word count: 273 words

Since I mentioned this in a previous post, I thought that I would get around to making that whole list.

Right now, I do not feel like triptans help out a whole lot, and would like to switch to low-dose narcotics at some point. Due to the severity of my asthma, I can not safely take any NSAIDs without risking prednisone.

I also require prior authorization for Trokendi and for some of my triptans (it seems Zomig requires it now).

Maintenance medications
Trokendi, 300mg: Anything with topiramate as the active ingredient is almost never without side effects, as I have learned. I take these (200mg + 100mg) at night, which lessens the side effects, and that helps… a bit.

Abortive medications
Fioricet: I find that this one works the best, although one dose is never enough.
Imitrex injections: These are rife with side effects, so I only use these when necessary.
Olanzapine, single dose: These help with really severe migraines, but they make me really tired.
Promethazine/tizanidine: These are for nausea and muscle spasm, respectively, and they are to be taken with whatever abortive medication that I give myself as necessary for each of those symptoms (and they generally are with severe migraines). Although I am growing more tolerant of them, I’m still hit out of the blue with the occasional side effect of tiredness. However, they do help ameliorate those specific symptoms, so…
Zomig dissolvable melt/nasal spray: I have to fight insurance due to prior authorizations on these, and they do help when I can’t give myself Fioricet, but they are not particularly good at ameliorating a lot of the pain.

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