Health update after a long while.

I’ve been flaring since early January, with my Crohn’s Disease symptoms somewhat worse in general but getting out of hand particularly when I’m on my period. I had my yearly Crohn’s Disease control labs and doctor’s appointment in the university hospital on February 3rd. There’s inflammation in the bowel and I’m not surprised because of said increase in symptoms, but at least for once it happened right when I had to have the labs done anyway, so didn’t need to do anything extra! The doctor upped azathioprine back to the original dosage and added in cortisteroids for three months because azathioprine takes that long to start to have an effect. Labs every three months and in August I’ll hear if the inflammation has improved. If not, the doctor said we’ll have to consider starting a biologic.

I don’t know yet whether cortisteroids has helped the inflammation any, but I’m certain it’s made both my chronic migraine worse as well as my sleeping problems. Because headache and sleep problems are among the many side affects listed, and both have gotten very much worse in the two weeks since I’ve been taking it. My basic, daily migraine headache pain has gone from 3-4 to 5-6, and I’ve averaged obly 3-4 hours of sleep a night for 1,5 weeks now, not all of it even continuous sleep. I’m having trouble both getting to sleep, and staying asleep, and I’m having a lot of dreams again. These two things are currently really making my life hard. I’m not sure whether I should be in contact with the IBD nurses – the last time I was on cortisteroids, I was in bad enough shape with the migraine and sleep that I didn’t feel any additional effects regards headache or sleep from cortisteroids, or just didn’t have them. But now that both my daily migraine has been somewhat better and especially sleep has been a lot betterer, although not good like it was when I was healthy…. this now feels very hard to endure, and I’m not sure whether I’m supposed to or not? I’m also a little worried that the side effects won’t go away after ending cortisteroids. It was a long road to decent sleep, and I despair thinking it’s gone away again 🙁

So far, I have missed one rehabilitation day (with a doctor’s note) out of three because of the flaring, and would have missed more if there hadn’t been a break in rehabilitation for most of January. I have a rehabilitation day tomorrow (Wednesday), I’ll see how it goes and the rest of the week and then maybe contact the IBD nurses if I still feel as bad? Maybe I actually should be on sick leave?

If I go silent for a while, and don’t make any updates, my health is why. I’m so tired I made an incredible number of spelling and wrong word mistakes while writing this, hope I caught most of them!

Other thoughts... it feels really strange to be finished with capping Star Treks DS9, VOY, TNG and TOS! (Never have had plans to cap ENT or early seasons of VOY, so I’m in effect finished except for new eps of PIC and DSC) Feels like there’s this huge hole now because the need to cap them has been in the background for like 20 years. Good thing there’s Picard, and Discovery. Also, this is the first time in my life when I have ready and easy access to currently airing Star Trek. That feels so weird too!

I’m enjoying Picard a lot, I love the slow, considered space that gives the characters time to breathe! I’ve always loved Romulans, so I’m happy to have much focus on them. And I love that we’ve been getting glimpses of life on Earth, and civilian life too. I don’t think any other Trek ever showed more than brief glimpses of that and it was always with guest-stars, too. And I squeed when 7of9 beamed in in the last few seconds of episode 4 – she’s been missed!