Friday, July 27, 2012

rejoining regular life

In the last couple of days, I've gone on two group bike rides, about 30 miles each, during mold season. My first real bike rides since 2004. During mold season. I'm sore, but that's a badge of honor.

Friday, July 20, 2012

more progress, but different

I'm not going to talk about me this time. For the benefit of people with chemical sensitivities on top of some other disease, I'm going to talk about my friend the really, really sick lady, who, one of these days, is going to need a different pseudonym.

My friend has Th1 disease (as defined on the Marshall Protocol website) on top of or as the cause of MCS and fibromyalgia. To tackle the MCS and fibro, we did DNRS together, and she's doing some energy work, which neither of us understand at all, but those two things are helping. She gets stronger every week, and she is fully present now, cracking jokes, passing information between caregivers whose shifts don't overlap, and teasing her husband. Back around six months ago, I hate to say this, but she pretty much just sat like a lump or slept, because if you feel crappy enough, that's about all you can pull off.

The inflammation (read: pain) from the Th1 disease didn't seem to change much with those treatments. But since she was doing better, she decided to try a modified version of the Marshall Protocol, which approached head-on, involves taking a lot of Benicar, a blood pressure drug with a very reasonable track record, along with a very low dose antibiotic. The Benicar does indeed lower your blood pressure, but it has the side effect of killing intracellular bacteria, which you then have to detox, and you get a major light-sensitivity problem. (That's actually a diagnostic tool -- if you get light-sensitive from Benicar, you have Th1 disease.) The antibiotic is supposed to make all that go smoother, and I imagine it does, but people who are really, really sick cannot handle those kinds of things.

Thus my friend is taking an eighth of a Benicar (around 5 mg) mostly every day with no antibiotic ever, and her pain is decreasing. She can get a funny reaction if she gets too much (those pills are hard to cut into eighths), but she hasn't had any trouble with light sensitivity.

So there you go: the state of my friend, who needs a new pseudonym.