Scattered Thoughts . . .

I had a relatively good day today for a change.  I slept about nine hours last night so I'm sure that helped considering I have not been sleeping well due to excruciating bone pain.  My bone pain has subsided to tolerable levels so that allowed me to get some much needed sleep.   Since I was feeling relatively well this morning, I managed to do some maintenance on a photography tripod head which is perhaps the most I've accomplished in any day since developing COVID in Manhattan before Christmas.  So, it was a pretty good day for a change. Tonight, however, I have a fever of 100.4° and that is not so good.   I've been see-sawing back and forth with fevers a few times a week for the past month.  In the previous month of COVID, I had a solid fever and I consistently tested positive for the virus.  I'm no longer testing positive but the fevers are still coming and going along with a few other problem symptoms.   My energy is still quite low.  As I've mentioned in a pr

I 'm still feeling mediocre...  not great, not terrible, sometimes feeling "fair", sometimes feeling lousy, from one to the other in waves...  overall, however, I'm feeling a bit better than yesterday so that is good.   My throat is still a bit sore and my stomach isn't the best.  I don't have much of an appetite.  My eyelids are puffy interfering with my peripheral vision which is a symptom I experienced my first time with COVID in 2020.   My headache seems to be gone and fever is mostly gone but  I'm still taking full doses of cold meds though and they have heavy doses of acetaminophen in them so that is likely taking care of any mild discomfort and fever.  I assume the cold meds are minimizing my runny nose too.   Even though I am feeling better than yesterday, I'm still not well though. Sheila, on the other hand, is getting worse even though she is still testing negative for COVID.  I suspect she does have the virus.  She never left the couch today

A s the evening wore on tonight, I starting feeling worse and worse again which does not please me in the least.  It reminds me that my previous bouts of COVID also went in waves.  Sometimes those waves were by the hour, sometimes by the day, sometimes by the week. When I grabbed my bag of medicines so I could take my nighttime dose of medications, I remembered that I only took half doses of cold medications at lunchtime and dinnertime.  By mid-evening, I was feeling quite lousy again. My throat was approaching the intolerable level of soreness again.  A bit of a headache is back again.  I'm still in and out of the bathroom too.  This evening, I noticed that my voice was getting hoarse and, at this point, I am losing my voice.  I just checked my temperature and my fever is back again...   I'm at 100.1 degrees. I guess I need to go back to full doses of cold medications in addition to all my usual medications and the newest anti-viral medication.   Still...  at the risk of jinxi

W e spent four days in Manhattan this past week and it was a really nice trip but not without its problems.   This Christmas trip to Manhattan was really for our two oldest grandchildren, Lukey and Kenzie, but Sheila and I enjoyed it too.  Christmastime is a great time to be in Manhattan because it seems like every window and every building is decorated very well. As I mentioned above, though, this relatively short trip was not without its little problems and even some big problems.   We had made two changes to our hotel accommodations in the weeks even before leaving the house.  In the end, we settled on staying at the Hilton Midtown and that was a good choice.  One problem was trying to find a hotel with vacancies when we needed a hotel.  Amtrak availability and hotel availability had to coincide.  Another problem is that we definitely wanted to be in midtown Manhattan where all the major sites are located.  We planned this two months in advance yet we still had some scheduling issue

I spent about 24 hours sick with a stomach virus.  It wasn't horrible but it was pretty lousy.  I'm typically not a puker but I had a very difficult time keeping everything down especially when I was lying in bed.   This virus started shortly after going to bed on Mother's Day so I must have picked it up on Saturday when I went to the Post Office to send a package.  I suppose it is possible that I picked it up on Mother's Day from Whitney or Ellie but it is more likely that I picked it up the previous day at the Post Office.   I spent almost all of Sunday night going to and from the bathroom.  Even when I was not in the bathroom, lying down to sleep was not much of an option.  Lying down just allowed the puke to move upward more easily so I spent my little bit of time in bed in a sitting position.  I think I may have gotten only one to two hours of sleep Sunday night before being awoken with a mouth full of puke.  I didn't actually get any restful hours of sleep un

My summers over the past few years have been mostly completely lost summers of poor health and it looks as though this summer will be the same.   I had been sick all through the last three weeks of July with what was likely and presumably COVID, yet again, and now I have the terribly inflamed joint problem starting all over again just like after the first two times I had COVID.  As if that is not enough, either I am developing a mild case of shingles or those shingles-like symptoms are related to my inflamed joints.  If so, rather than having inflamed joints lingering for months, it is more like inflamed nerves.   About five days ago, I started developing pain from my right brow up across my forehead and across my scalp to the back of my head.  It is definitely burning, overly-sensitive, and irritated skin as opposed to something under the bone like in the brain.  We initially figured that maybe the latest bout with COVID triggered shingles.   I've had the better and newest shingle

I haven't written here in quite a while because I simply have not had the energy to accomplish anything including even writing a simple blog entry.  I assume my main problem is that I am still fighting off this virus that has been coming and going since May.  January to May was miserable with a solid fever for four months, breathing difficulties, sore throat, congestion, vision problems, cognitive difficulties, and absurd levels of fatigue.  These symptoms have been coming and going in waves since the fever broke in May. I'd say my biggest complaint is the viral fatigue.  The fatigue from my mast cell illness is debilitating and what I would call "overwhelming" at times but this fatigue due to this virus is far worse.  Just standing for any amount of time is too much to do.  I don't even have the energy to simply stand long enough to stop and say just a short sentence to Sheila.  I need to sit down.  By the time I get cleaned up and brush my teeth first thing in t

Just about all of my "cold and flu" symptoms seem to be behind me but my level of fatigue is still quite overwhelming.  I spent just about all of this past weekend sleeping.  I awoke only to use the bathroom, eat and take medications.   I still have some minor symptoms of a cold...  some gunk in my nose and running down the back of my throat at times.  The fever has been gone for days though so that is good.  Headaches still come and go but are so minimal at this point that they are hardly worth mentioning.  I still get bouts of difficulty breathing but that could be due to my primary illness since I do experience this regularly anyway.  What I was experiencing a month or two ago, however, was well beyond my usual breathing problems (since being on medications to control these problems).  Overall, most of these untested, undiagnosed "cold and flu" symptoms seemed to have dissipated.  The fatigue is worse than usual though.  It is lingering.  It is overwhelming. 

Sheila and I are still quarantined at home as Sheila continues to work from home and the numbers of people infected around us multiplies.   Even before this virus, we very rarely wandered from the house for social things anyway so this new quarantine and 'shelter in place' order hasn't changed our daily life much at all.  By early to mid-January, it became abundantly clear to us that the virus was gaining a foothold in the US so we immediately stopped visiting restaurants, canceled all future travel plans for the foreseeable future and began cutting out our weekly shopping trips.  (This is when the Federal government should have began a serious attempt at containing and minimizing the effects of this virus.  We knew it was coming at this point so we immediately changed our behavior...   the White House, well, this White House only helps the wealthy so it would have been silly for anyone to seriously believe they would come up with an effective plan to minimize and contain

This has been an absolutely brutal Christmas week so we have postponed Christmas until... well...  until things improve significantly. I haven't even written lately because my own health has been that poor.  I've still been trying to recover from a disastrous attempt at a colonoscopy in early September. It has been a terrible few months as far as my health goes so I have not written here in the blog nearly as often as I normally do.  Sheila is still struggling with terrible side effects of her cancer treatment.  Sleep is difficult for her for various reasons including pain, headaches and night sweats.  The sleep deprivation takes its toll on everything. On top of all that, she's even been trying to shake a nasty cold for the past two weeks. While Sheila has been trying to shake her cold, I developed her cold a few days ago and a nasty cold it is. No amount of cold medications have been able to even slow it down a little bit. I was up all through the night the other

My health has been quite lousy since January. Sheila and I seem to be passing a cold and a stomach bug back and forth between us, over and over. These types of 'common colds' always send my mast cells into a hyperactive tailspin so I'm having great difficulty focusing on anything because my thought processes are a muddled mess! I have a dozen different projects bouncing around in my head all at once. Most of these projects I actually want to accomplish... some I  need to accomplish as soon as I am feeling well enough... and all of these projects are occupying my thoughts at any given moment. If I'm not struggling with nausea and spending time in the bathroom, I'm struggling with pain and overwhelming fatigue. Sheila hasn't been much better lately. I feel as though I am spending all my time in bed, sleeping away the winter as projects keep backing up and my to-do list gets longer and longer. My spinal injuries are terribly inflamed. I assume much of t