I'm Back! It's been a long, strange, and somewhat scary journey.

Driving back home from an overnight stay in Valparaiso, IN, I felt a sort of itchy area on the right side of my neck. I didn't think much of it, except that the next morning, I woke up with the right side of my neck looking like I was half-Cardassian. Overnight, it started to really hurt, and I got a walk-in appointment the next morning at my VA Clinic.

The nurse practitioner took one look at me and said "Oh, you must be in pain!"

D'oh! I felt like my right side was on fire.
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The rest of my visit consisted of being photographed front, right, and center, and displayed to every medical and nursing student my nurse practitioner could lay hands on. It was exactly like being a sentient zoo exhibit. No one there had apparently ever seen as bad a case of shingles. I eventually went home with a bunch of acyclovir, tramadol, and gabapentin. Someone pharmaceutically inclined may divine where this is headed.

I pretty much spent Labor Day weekend on my back on the couch, pumping down acyclovir and tramadol for the pain. This had....unexpected.... effects. By Monday, I was pretty damn sure that the gravity generators below decks were misaligned somehow. Tuesday early morning, I was pretty sure that the living room vector compensators had failed, since my granddaughter was playing with her art supplies on the ceiling. The biker dude in leathers on the couch didn't seem to find that unusual.

I called the clinic, and they suggested I have myself driven in. headspace was available and took me down to the hospital. I was fairly weak by the time I was there, and in need of a wheelchair after one short stint in line. I felt like the befuddled wizard going "What is this magic?!"

By the time I was in the hospital for 24 hours, I had completely lost all ability to use my legs. Trying to put weight on them was like trying to stand a watermelon on cubes of jello. Not gonna happen.

After about two days of physical therapy and no progress I started to get pretty disheartened, and confessed to jessamyn in a call one evening that I felt like a 'scared little boy' pretty much. That was probably about my lowest point. The medication changes finally started kicking in, probably the next morning.

A Rheumatologist showed up the next morning with an assortment of needles and enormous syringes, and proceeded to drain about half a Coke can's worth of yellow stuff out of my knee. It turned out that with all the swings and changes in drugs had somehow allowed a massive case of gout to flare up, which is why my legs were useless. Massive Steroids to the rescue!

Thank goodness I wasn't actually permanently crippled. It took me three days to learn how to maneuver my butt out of bed and into a wheelchair by myself, and every effort left me exhausted and gasping like a beached puffer fish. I can't imagine that any other task I needed to learn to do would have been any easier.

A special award to the designers of the newfangled hospital bed with all the anti-bedsore provisions- We'll call it the De Sade Award for Sleep Deprivation. This bed from hell moves you just a little bit, every 30 seconds if you are lying still. This movement is accompanied my little motors whirring and geartrains and bearings groaning, much like a little etude by Arthur Honegger.

So: Discharge Diagnosis: Orthostatic Hypotension due to drug ADR with a bunch of stuff about gout and Hypothyroidism and Deconditioning AV hallucinations. Woo Hoo!

I'm home and getting my legs back. Thanks for all the fun links you guys left earlier, and thanks just for being you guys.