Scattered Thoughts . . .

Sometimes a lousy night of health like I had last night continues on into the following day. Today is one such day. It is almost 24 hours since my latest transient health problems began last night and I am feeling just as lousy... extreme nausea, gurgling intestines, stomach pain, weakness, overwhelming fatigue (I slept all afternoon), and I am just feeling miserable.  I took some extra medications last night that target the gastrointestinal tract as well as a medication to help minimize the nausea. I added more extra medications today...  some extra mast cell stabilizers, more medications to target the gastrointestinal tract, and I'm about to add more anti-nausea medications.  Systemic Mastocytosis is unpredictable but after using up precious energy as I did during our trip to San Antonio, I know I should expect some lousy health. The problem is that I just cannot predict which problems I will experience...  which symptoms... how many symptoms... the severity ...

I've never really been a big fan of poultry even before my illness. In fact, you would often find me in the backyard at the grill with a thick, juicy steak on Thanksgiving Day while my family was inside waiting for some tasteless bird to come out of the oven. Don't get me wrong, I love tasty grilled chicken... deep fried chicken... chicken parmesan...  chicken curry... and even chicken cacciatore... but I'm really someone who loves beef and pork. Poultry is rarely something I would order in a nice restaurant (and never something I order in a less-than-nice restaurant if I feel I may get bad poultry).  Even when I was healthy, before this insidious illness, chicken would make me feel slimey and I would be hungry again within an hour. Fish would affect me the same way. I always just figured that I am more of a hearty meat and potatoes sort of guy. And, let's be honest, I am, always have been, and always will be a meat and potatoes sort of guy. It turns out that perhap...

St Louis Gateway Arch One of our many stops on our trek to San Antonio was in St Louis. We approached St Louis after dark and were hoping to catch a glimpse of the iconic Gateway Arch through our sleeper car windows.  This was not the start of our trip but I thought I would start with my most difficult photos from the trip. (I really want to get these problematic photos behind me so I can move on to the much more beautiful photos.) These nighttime photos are so poor that I have been hemming and hawing for the past 24 hours hours trying to decide if I should even share them at all. Needless to say, I decided to show a few of the best of these lousy nighttime photos. As we had hoped, we did see the arch as we entered the city but getting a nice photo of this sight was difficult at best. The arch itself was not illuminated so that posed some problems in the dark of night. The only illumination was ambient and reflected light from surrounding buildings. The city itself is r...