I’m alive! How about you?

It’s been an insanely long time since I gave this site its due. I sup­pose the real prob­lem with blog­ging about health prob­lems is that the peo­ple who know them best, by def­i­n­i­tion, have health prob­lems. I’d love to find some­one with whom to co-write this thing, so we could cover for each other!

Any­way, I had an insanely long bad period but I’m feel­ing bet­ter now. One fac­tor in the improve­ment was stop­ping Effexor XR, which I’d taken for years. I didn’t actu­ally do that on purpose—It was due to an insanely irre­spon­si­ble doc­tor who refused to see me because of a screw-up in his office’s pro­ce­dures, not any­thing I’d done wrong. I had to just stop tak­ing it, cold turkey, which led to seizures and other prob­lems. On the plus side, though, I’ve been far less drowsy and don’t need nearly as many hours of sleep as I did before. (I’m actu­ally expe­ri­enc­ing some insom­nia, which isn’t good, but it’s a change.)

Any­way, my Social Secu­rity dis­abil­ity claim was finally approved after over five years of wait­ing. They haven’t started pay­ing any­thing yet, but that’s sup­posed to hap­pen Real Soon Now. I have to tell you, though—the Medicare thing is a con­fus­ing maze of choices, obvi­ously designed by bureau­crats. You almost need to become a Medicare expert just to know what ben­e­fits are avail­able and how to get them!

For now, here’s a link to an arti­cle I found inter­est­ing:
Do Fibromyal­gia Pain Killers Make You a Likely Crime Victim?

I don’t agree with all of the advice. Peo­ple in Geor­gia have been arrested for hav­ing legit­i­mately pre­scribed med­ica­tions because the med­ica­tions weren’t in pre­scrip­tion con­tain­ers. It’s a real nui­sance to carry the bot­tles instead of just what you need, and it prob­a­bly does put us at greater risk for crime—but is it worth being arrested? That’s a Catch-22.

August 13, 2009  Tags: crime, medications, safety  Posted in: From the news

One Response

  1. Hope - August 20, 2009

    Yay for still alive! And Yay!! for dis­abil­ity finally being approved.

    I some­times won­der if there isn’t some level of sadism in the “design” of Medicare ben­e­fits. I work with Medicare pro­fes­sion­ally, and wouldn’t begin to claim I know all that much about it.

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