feeling yuck again . . . still muddlin' thru somehow

It's a bad season for asthma here, leaving me wiped out something terrible, and having to resort to medicine I haven't used in years.

I shook the bronchitis that was bothering me earlier in the month, but my asthma has flared up and is leaving me with no energy to write or, do much besides my absolute necessities . . .

In theory reality I have more than just asthma, I really also have emphysema in one lobe of my lungs.  I usually manage my lung health well enough that my own doctor of more than a decade has forgotten I have emphysema, requiring me to remind him once a year ot two ago, necessitating a look back thru the charts to a MRI from 2000.

It's not something I like to discuss or admit, and it is a legacy of smoking cigarettes for part of the 1980's and all of the '90's.  It was a stupid disgusting habit, and I have no one to blame but myself for the fact that I have the disease.

I suppose one reason I hesitate to discuss emphysema more openly, is the fact that it's usually an old person's disease.  I consider myself to be solidly ensconced in middle age, not old age.  Yet, it's also true that I have degenerative disc disease and moderate osteoarthritis in my lower back, also diseases of the aged.

I also have been diagnosed with fibromyalgia, which is far more common with women, one reason I rarely discuss that condition either.  It's not a masterly thing from which to suffer.  I suppose emphysema and arthritis aren't real masterly either, so maybe that has something to do with my hesitance to advertise those diseases.

But hell's bells folks, I feel like a semi-wreck right now, I've not felt well enough to write anything really good for weeks now (my apologies to the postings I've just disparaged but you are what you are, and are perhaps not my absolute best work IMHO. . . )

I guess it's time to break down and see my Doc about some prednisone or a Medrol pack.  Damn, I hate taking those, but I'm to the point where there's no choice.

I'd like to leave this post on a high note, so I'll point out that a pair of new floggers I commissioned from Snake Pit Leather Works are completed and should be on their way here as we speak.  So, for that I'm certainly excited.  And there's the road trip to Chicago with some friends planned for this weekend, lookiing forward to that too . . .