rootofnewt | take some more pills, call me in a couple days...

doc told me to up the naproxen dosage... i have OTC generic aleve, so he said about 660mg morning and night, plus 440 mid-day for awhile. keep taking the valium at night. since cold makes it worse, keep using heat. and to take it easy and call him back late wednesday afternoon or thursday. he thinks that this is related to whatever it is that's been causing my joints to swell and ache, but he's not sure what that is, since nothing's showing up in my bloodwork. he has amusing phrases: "your fibro or whatever nebulosities are doing this..." He agrees that fibro shouldn't be causing this kind of joint/cartilage issues, but thinks that it's something that goes hand-in-hand with it for whatever reason. and he suggested that we think about x-rays just to rule out anything related to the heart and cyst issues i had last year. we'll wait on those, see if this works its way out. he doesn't want to subject me to steroids again so soon, either.

*sigh*

my surgeon last year warned me that i would take two years to recover *minimum* from the cyst resection. he also said that after a year or so, i could expect to have some odd health issues start popping up... basically, i had a cyst the size of a grapefruit in my body for 27 years which was inflamed in cycles and rather well entrenched. without that constant adversary, my immune system (which was in hyperdrive) can be expected to do some wild swings. and even though it wasn't touching my thymus, nobody knows enough about the thymus to be sure that the cyst/inflammation had no effect on it or whether the lack thereof will have any effect. The thing is--there's no way to be sure that the wacky health problems I've had this year (actually *catching* the flu, having severe allergic reactions to new things, the costochronditis, etc) are related to that or not.

all i know is that this roller coaster is driving me nuts.