Happy New Year!

Well it's 2010.. It certainly doesn't feel like it's been ten years since the start of "The new Millennium" ? I'm sure back in the 1970's and 80's we all thought that we would be flying around in space ships by now and living in a vastly different world. Other than the development of the Internet and the mobile phone the world isn't that much different than it was 30 years ago.

Still, I have a feeling that this is going to be a great year, maybe even a great decade. The world seemed to have stood still for the best part of the last ten years. I would be nice to think that the next ten years is a time of catching up.

Last night Sarah and I celebrated the end of the year by going out to dinner at "Little India" in Lower Hutt, then dropping in to my brother and sister in laws to see in the new year.
I drank a little more than I have in a number of years, I knew I'd pay the price today and I did.
However it was an interesting and rewarding exercise in pain and what it all means in my case.

I'll explain... At around 4am I was woken by an excruciating pain in my lower back. Now I have mentioned before that this pain is exactly like the pain I get when I have had active Hodgkins Lymphoma, so it freaks me out. After about ten minutes of attacking my back the pain suddenly moved to my hips and increased in magnitude to about 8 on the 1-10 pain scale.

It was so bad it took my breath away and I was moaning. I got up to grab some water to take some painkillers and my legs collapsed from under me. I had to drag myself back to bed by supporting myself with my arms. Sarah asked why if I was in so much pain was I laughing?
The answer was simple.. This was steroid related, it's a classic symptom, pain and muscle weakness in the hips. This was not the same as when I had HL. I was over the moon with relief and at the same time in massive pain!

Then as suddenly as it arrived the pain left my hips and moved to my knees! Now I can tell you now there are no lymph nodes in your knees! So again this reinforced the fact that this was the prednisone playing havoc with my joints and old injury areas.
I put up with the pain for three hours before deciding to get up and eat so I could take my steroids. Within an hour the pain had completely gone.

Sarah and I had gone for a walk yesterday in the Belmont regional park. The track runs alongside our property for quite some distance then heads up into the hills above the "Dry Creek" quarry. I found the walk very easy and it was a good test of my reviving fitness. However it is hard on the knees on the walk back down and perhaps this is why they flared up in the morning?

I'll see what happens over the next few mornings and if I have a repeat of last night's pain I shall look at splitting the medication into two lots, morning and night.
You should always take prednisone in the morning because that is when your body produces most of it's hormones naturally. However I'd need to balance that against the damage done by the fever and inflammation when the drug wears off too soon. Hopefully by splitting the dose so I take a small amount at night will carry me through to the next morning's dose.

OK.. enough of the boring steroid dramas..

The new house is really coming along now. There's still quite a bit to do in getting the water system running but the house build itself is on track.
The water system involves a 15,000 liter catchment tank, a UV light water treatment plant that then filters the water down to a point that it's as good as the bottled stuff.

By passing the water through a tube and exposing it to Ultra Violet light any virus's or bacteria are instantly made inert. The UV destroys the DNA and makes it unable to divide and replicate. It may sound like over-kill but with my immune system so weak I can't afford to risk getting sick from the water we drink.

The same water tank supplies our Fire sprinkler system and that's powered by a huge capacity electric pump capable of running four sprinklers at full flow. To get the whole system up and running I need to co-ordinate the work of a plumber, a fire system engineer, a drain-layer and an electrician.
Doing all this in the middle of the holiday period is going to be a challenge!!

Have a fantastic 2010!!

Till next time ...Ron

Two mornings worth of back pain.

..and now twice in a row I have woken at 6am with a pulsing back-ache and a slight fever.

I've searched the Internet looking for a connection between steroids, Hodgkin's and a pulsing back ache. I can find none. The fever may provide the clue. Perhaps my nadir for the steroid effect is early morning and it's at that point that the fever builds and maybe this allows my old lower back injury to flare. It's all guesswork.

Previously when my Hodgkin's was active I would get a pulsing back-ache in the evening.
I could do nothing to ease the pain except take a panadol and wait. This time round it can be "turned off" if I can find the right "sweet spot" to position my back into. So it sounds like it may be a nerve that is being pinched or pushed against. The pulsing with the heart beat is weird though.

Well I'm hoping this is just a side effect from prednisone. It freaks me out when I get a symptom that is exactly the same as when I have had active Hodgkin's. Talk about paranoid. They say you can never relax after you have had cancer. Oh well the coming weeks will tell. It will either get better or worse.

..and then back to normal

My temperature is back to a stable 36.5C today, so it was probably just a reaction to the couple of drinks and all the food I had on Christmas day. Add to that the extra few hours between doses and that probably caused it.

My face is already getting a bit puffy, which is a common side effect from steroids. Hope it doesn't get too big. I'll look like a cartoon character!!