Thanks for sticking around despite my not posting in over a month. I’m not just dropping in to reassure you once again that I have no current plans to stop blogging, either. Newly Nerfed needs a little work, cosmetically as well as under the hood, and I’ll be making those changes as well as perhaps blogging more.
(There may or may not be a very hectic time in my near-ish future, so I don’t want to make any promises. And I’ll tell you about it once I can. No, I am not pregnant in any way.)
As I started to update the blog, I began wondering whether I could really still call myself newly nerfed. My health problems cropped up in 2003, and I finally had to stop working in 2008. And now it’s almost three years of reading, keeping up with research, and writing. Aren’t I now just…nerfed? I’ll be writing about that next week.
This month has flown by in a muddled memory of stress and uncertainty, excitement and good times. Life brought many distractions, including other writing projects and obligations…which are another reason I can’t promise consistent posts here. And that’s not bad at all; it’s just that having to prioritize my energy, I let a lot of it got sucked up into April without too much left for personal blogging. May may be similar.
If you haven’t already read it, I send you off with my guest post for SaveYourself.ca, a Canadian blog about managing pain. It’s about maintaining a romantic relationship when struggling with chronic pain and illness. (It’s not as depressing as it sounds.)
If you have already read it, well then, here’s a clip from The Sarah Jane Adventures. After Lis Sladen‘s death this month, it takes on a new level of meaning. (Which is more depressing than it sounds.) Goodbye, our Sarah Jane.
Hey look, it’s a new post! That must mean WordPress has behaved for 10 whole minutes in a row. I could believe in miracles.
The blog is still under construction; bugs abound, there’s some typographical stuff I need to hunt down and fix, and I’m also not 100% on the new layout yet. What do you think?
I’m a bit more of a spectator than a participant these days. I’m happy to say there’s been progress on my pet project that I’m very excited about. But as far as other work and projects, I’m in something of a holding pattern. The past couple of months of doctor visits, diagnostic tests, and a roller-coaster of hope for a new and definitive diagnosis has actually left me two steps back, with my CFS doc now convinced I have more of a “CFS Plus,” based on my inexplicable bout of optic neuritis and some other problems that don’t quite fit the profile.
So I’m left with worsening symptoms and even less idea of what’s really wrong with me. Normally I get past these kinds of setbacks relatively quickly, but it’s been tougher this time. Chronic illness is a constantly fluid situation; it’s kind of like standing on a seesaw that someone else is moving up and down, and you learn to adapt to the wobbling, even if you’re caught off balance from time to time. Right now I feel like I got thrown off the seesaw and landed face-first in the sandbox. It’s just sand, so I’ll make it out, but it’s kind of deep, so it might take a while.
In other health news, Paul and I both got our TDaP boosters today. In case you didn’t know, there is a serious outbreak of whooping cough (pertussis) in California right now, from which nine infants have died so far. These babies were too young to be vaccinated, so they were most likely infected by a well-meaning adult with no idea he or she was a carrier. This is scary to me because I consider myself pretty well educated as a layperson when it comes to vaccines, and I had no idea until this year that adults need not just tetanus boosters, but the whole tetanus/diphtheria/pertussis combo. We can’t just write this off to the antivaxxers; this is a serious failing in patient education, to my mind.
But at least Paul and I can now go visit our friends’ adorable new babies, safe in the knowledge that we’re as medically protected as possible from causing them harm, and that we’ve done our part for herd immunity. On that note I’d like to send you off with this great song about vaccines and how they’ve made life better for us.
I upgraded WordPress, my theme, and Akismet, and now none of them work right. Apologies to new readers; it’s usually better looking around here.
I’m going to ditch my theme and figure out how to recreate the look of the blog with a much, much simpler one. While I work on this minor redesign, I may not be posting. And if I do, please excuse the mess.
UPDATE: Something has gone quite spectacularly wrong now, causing server errors and WordPress problems and all kinds of fun. No ETA on when it will get fixed.
I’m sending you off with something, I don’t care if you’ve seen it already, Brian Hart posted it on Facebook and I about ruptured my gut laughing at it. Have a gut-rupturingly fun weekend!
