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February 27, 2024

Chronic pain and other delights. Also, Ancestral Night is still on sale.

First things first! Ancestral Night is still on sale for $1.99 in North America! Get it while the getting is good!

In unrelated news, I’ve been trying a whole bunch of stuff to deal with the chronic pain that’s become increasingly un-ignorable for the past nine years or so, and boy is it a series of exhausting frustrations.

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I’ve always had joint pain and skin irruptions, and for many years it was undiagnosed/not taken seriously/dismissed. It came and it went, and often there were long periods when the pain was in remission and I could exercise and participate in sports that I enjoyed fairly normally, though I’d always have days with inexplicable fatigue.

Finally, in my late 30s, I had learned enough about advocating for myself to get a real diagnosis, and here I am at 52 being treated for psoriatic arthritis and fibromyalgia and trying very hard not to feel like a toadstool when everything is hard and spoons are limited. The problem, of course, is that chronic pain tends to lead to chronic immobility, and chronic immobility leads to a host of other problems.

And things have just been getting rougher and rougher and I have been getting more and more toadstool-like since 2015. The immunosuppressants are helping, but last week was a really bad week, and I am feeling pretty put out with this meat puppet that will not do the things I want it to do.

I have also been on a one-month vacation from the tamoxifen I take as a cancer preventative, because that can cause joint and muscle pain, but it doesn’t seem to be helping reduce my symptoms, so that’s both good (it means I can stay on the tamoxifen) and bad (a hope of feeling better dashed.)

Anyway, as part of Project Be Less Of A Toadstool, and in the interests of staying off blood pressure medication and so forth, I’m almost 3 weeks into the Zombies, Run! (now rebranded as ZRX as they do more non-zombie-related content)/ Marvel Move Thor & Loki couch-to-5k program. I did the original Zombies, Run! C25K years ago when recovering from an injury. It’s hard to drag myself out there and the fatigue is real but as long as I can keep myself moving, I can keep myself moving—if that makes any sense.

And it’s not like I hurt an worse afterwards.

So wish me luck!

How about you? What hard things are you doing to take care of yourself these days?

Best,

Bear

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