2014 - My Health in Review

2014 saw significant improvement for me again.  Based on an average of all 365 days of my daily health chart, my daily health rating went up almost four percentage points from 2013. (And 2013 was over 5 points higher than 2012).  So clearly I'm headed in the right direction.  Of course, this all assumes that my ratings system stays consistent over time, (which I think it has--I use certain benchmarks to ensure that--but it's hard to be 100% certain.)

On my daily health chart, besides giving myself a daily overall health rating, I keep track of what I call my "big three" symptoms, each on a scale of 1-10:  (1) flu-like inflammation & fatigue, (2) air hunger / shortness of breath, and (3) kidney-area flank pain.  In 2014, only 26 days out of 365 recorded any flank pain whatsoever (7%), and no entry for flank pain was over a 4 out of 10.  

So when I created a new spreadsheet for my 2015 health chart, I eliminated the "flank pain" column.  Ah, but ME/CFS giveth and taketh away.  I had to replace that column with a column for prostate pain, as that seems to be my new nemesis.  Consistent with what many other ME/CFS patients have written online, it often seems as if the pain and inflammation associated with this disease simply migrates around the body, camping out in one area for a few years before mysteriously moving onto another area.

My 2013 year-end review, posted last January, said that maybe 2014 would be the year that I started to cut back on supplements and see which ones I truly need.  Well, that hasn't happened yet, for various reasons, but I'm renewing that goal for 2015.  I'll be starting work with a new doctor soon, and she has promised to help fine-tune my supplement routine.  

As I wrote about a few weeks ago, I quit Dr. Yasko's program after almost two years of experimentation.  I'm going to continue with a few "short route" methylation supplements for the time being, but have stopped experimenting with vitamin b12 and "long route" supplements.  They simply haven't worked out no matter how slowly I titrate, or how small a dose, or how long I gave myself to push past "start-up reactions".  I mean, yes, I can take a molecule of B12 and be OK, but any substantial dose whatsoever brings on nerve inflammation and brain fog.  So I'm done experimenting.  It doesn't seem that I really need methylation to make improvements right now, so why keep messing with it?   

Overall, 2014 saw a large return of functionality for me, in ways that just weren't possible a year or two ago.  I still have a long way to go, and I realize that the trend could reverse at any time, but for now I'm just trying to enjoy every day in which I don't feel like I did a few years ago.   

On Celebrex, Pain, and My ****

[This post contains some detailed descriptions dealing with male anatomy.  If that bothers you, don't read on.]

Just after Christmas, my prostate pain came back.  Truthfully, it never went away, but for most of December it had become mild.  Then it stoked back up for no clear reason.

(I'm trying not to let this blog turn into "My Prostate Blog," but it's what's on my mind lately.  I noticed that my click-rate falls when I blog about this topic, probably because half the population has trouble relating.  But I don't blog for clicks anyway.)

I returned to my urologist and told him that we had no other choice but to do "the test."  As I wrote in previous posts, the best way to know if one's prostatitis is bacterial or non-bacterial is to have a doctor "massage" the prostate (yes, by insertion of a finger through the anus), and then test the fluid that's forced out.  (The fluid isn't semen, but one component of it.) 

From September to November I took a constant string of antibiotics based on my urologist's mere guess that my problem was bacterial.  Many doctors think nothing of prescribing long term antibiotics—they're apparently not up on the latest research about the importance of healthy gut flora. I had reluctantly gone along with antibiotics through the end of November, but when the pain came back, I'd had enough of the indeterminacy.  

My urologist kept delaying testing the prostate fluid because he said the process of forcing it out is painful and sometimes makes prostatitis worse.  I said I had to know before taking any more antibiotics.  I like information, not guesswork.  PLUS, if the test comes back positive, we would know exactly what type of bacteria we're dealing with and what type of antibiotic to use.  

So we did the test.  It was painful, but not excruciating.  In fact, I felt much better for about 2 or 3 days after the test -- something many prostatitis patients experience.  Apparently, draining some of the fluid in the prostate often eases the pain.

To help with the pain until the test results come back, the doctor prescribed Celebrex.  I've never tried it before, but so far it seems to be helping quite a bit.  As far as I can tell, Celebrex has no euphoric affect like Vicodin, Percocet, or Ultram (which is good when I need to work), but seems to reduce the inflammation a lot.  So far, it's been a good week for pain.