Skirmishing with MS Day Two – Advancing In A Different Direction

Updated: 11:40, 2:16, 5:47, 10:38

Well it’s been an interesting morning so far.

First thing was discovering my fasting blood sugar is 190.  Not so good, considering the insulin and Metformin aren’t nearly as effective due to the Solumedrol.

Then we discover the IV line is blocked somewhere – can’t even get the initial saline flush into it.  Put in a call to Home Solutions, who’ll send a nurse to resite the line.

Tried to call doctor’s office to talk to him or his nurse to try and get a change made to the insulin sliding scale to take the effects of Solumedrol on insulin and Metformin into account, can’t reach either of them (but the receptionist, who’s a great lady, leaves a note on his desk to see if he’ll call me back ASAP.

So, absolutely nothing in motion as yet.  One worrying possibility is that they’re going to abort the whole evolution, which is just going to piss me off and question what the entire point of this was: surely they’ve had patients take Solumedrol who’ve been pre-diabetic before and know how to control the whole situation.  I know they knew I was pre-diabetic, it says it in big letters on the order I kept a copy of before it was sent to them (oh copiers, how I love thee).

And to cap it all? PEPCO (not to be confused with TEPCO, but only because they haven’t managed to have a nuclear meltdown yet) is going to kill the power to several blocks here for 4 hours starting at 10am while they string new thicker power lines (and when I say thicker, we’re talking the size of Arnie’s biceps here) presumably as a setup process for when (if) WMATA puts the Purple Line for MetroRail a few blocks from here in the far far future (unfortunately not in a galaxy far far away).

I’m not entirely sure if I can set this up to blog from a smartphone, but I’ll be on Twitter as long as my smartphone’s power holds out and will try and post updates (if I have any) through there.

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[Updated 11:40]

So, no response from doctor’s office as yet about changing the insulin sliding scale so the insulin might actually work.  I’m sorry but 200+ blood sugar readings with 4-8 units of insulin inside me is becoming rather frakking annoying!

Did get a call from the health people however.  The nurse will be around this afternoon to resite the IV.  I guess it’s going to go in my elbow this time, which guarantees it’ll need resiting again tomorrow – my elbows have never liked being IV sites, I move too much.

From what I can tell, the IV’s airlocked, and I can’t clear it.  Nothing’s working, but I know if I pull it and resite back on another vein on the back of my hand it’s really going to piss off the nurse and the doctor.  Even though my ceritifications expired years ago I’m perfectly capable of running the new line, but they’d still complain.

It’s ironic.  I spent all the time of day zero worrying about the effects of the Solumedrol, but every single problem with this entire evolution so far has been a process mess, nothing to do with the drug (unless you count the total lack of information from anyone about SOlumedrol degrading the effects of insulin and oral diabetic medication.  Did no-one ever think to put that in the frakking new patient’s handbook??

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[Updated 2:16]

Well, the rain has stopped so PEPCO seems to be gearing up to kill the power once again.  I better make this quick.

Got a call back from the doctor himself, and he’s adding Lantus to my insulin regime until the SOlumedrol evolution is complete.  The effects of Solumedrol on my blood sugar may last a few days longer than the end of the infusion, so better to be safe than sorry.  As for the NovoLog insulin sliding scale and the Metformin (which was until this all exploded the only thing I needed to control my blood sugar) those are going to stay the same.

Now I just have to wait for the nurse to come and try and figure out what blew with my IV line and try and persuade her not to resite it into my elbow.

Why does something so simple have to be so complicated?  And why didn’t anyone warn me about the blood sugar issues to a degree where I had the proper information right at the start? This is kind of critical information, someone who doesn’t have diabetes might have blood sugar readings in the danger zone on Solumedrol, but no-one seems to warn them.

Once this is all over, I think I need to point my doctor and Home Services to this blog to see if there’s anything they can learn from it and change their operational procedures to better inform patients about the blood sugar issue.  People seem to get so worried about the side-effects of Solumedrol itself that they skip over the prophylactic measures needed to control the blood sugar.

On the bright side, no Solumedrol infusion yet today.  On the bad side, no more strange ideas today about being impregnated by a strange plastic egg.

What, you thought I’d have forgotten that part??

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[Updated 5:47]

It seems the IV had blown, so no wonder it wasn’t working.  Nurse came and resited the IV, and bless her heart it’s in the back of my hand again so I can sleep easy and still type to some degree.

Hooked up to the second bag of Solumedrol now.  I’ve discovered if I wear one of my husband’s shirts, I can tuck my alien egg into the breast pocket and keep the IV line clear of tangling on stuff.

According to the nurse, the effects of the Solumedrol on spiking blood sugar varies from patient to patient after the infusion cycle is done – so it could be the weekend before my sugar levels begin to return to normal.  In the meantime, yet more needles and numbers to have to play with *sigh*.

As far as the (lack) of side effects so far is concerned, the nurse warned me that the effects of the Solumedrol itself will be cumulative – the third egg might kick the side effects in after all.  Still no metallic taste yet with this second egg yet.

Had the strangest thought earlier.  I’ve been hating my immune system because it’s trying to kill me for so long now, yet the idea of killing my immune system temporarily to get some respite from it’s attacking my nerves is disturbing to me.

I also just realized that when I switched the site over to the new design, I forgot to add some of the old features like “Related Links”.  Hopefully, the Solumedrol will get me manic enough later to rectify that oversight

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[Updated: 10:38]

One thing I’m learning through all this is that no matter how much you try to prepare everything, both mentally and physically, for this evolution, Mr Murphy is sitting right there behind you laughing as he pokes into the situation to screw things up.

For various technical reasons, I have neither the Lantus nor fresh needles for the NovoLog injector pen tonight.  Thankfully, I could get hold of my doctors after hours to ask what I could do as a fall-back for tonight, and I’ll go in to the office tomorrow to get actual paper prescriptions no-one can get so totally wrong when they’re submitted by telephone.

Again and again the stress of the entire evolution has been peripheral issues to the Solumedrol itself – it’s been behaving itself perfectly, it’s everything that goes with it that’s being a problem and there’s no real way to predict or control the potential hangups.

The second dose has finally resulted in the metallic taste in the mouth, but it’s minor and breath mints help – it hasn’t affected my taste of food or drink to any noticeable degree.  And I have to say, there has to have been an uptick in energy, I’m not entirely certain I could have handled all this stress before the Solumedrol started – although I didn’t quite intend to use the newly acquired energy dealing with this all!

Of course, I still have the third dose to go, tomorrow, and the days following the course, so things might change as it all reaches its maximum concentrations, but so far so good..

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