Clearly, I'm on Vacation.

So it's been a busy week, and it's about to be a busier few (and by busier I mean incredibly fun but with very limited access to internet) coming up.  I expect to start regularly updating again around January 10th when I get back from San Francisco which is more or less when my regular schedule will resume.

Until then, friends, have a great Christmas/Holiday Season/Time.  In the immortal words of either Bill or Ted, be excellent to each other.

Short Cuts: Free (X-TREME) Marketing Solutions for Healthy Products I Like

Wherein I offer my considerable marketing skills, for free, to companies whose stuff I like.

So one of the obvious downsides of being "in the P-Zone" (on high doses of the corticosteroid prednisone) is that it turns your metabolism into a one-way makeover machine that transforms dowdy carbohydrate into glamorous back fat.  It also throws off your sodium/potassium levels so that any excess (significantly less than what most people eat daily) intake of salt gives you moon-face, which is the technical medical term for what happens when your cheeks and neck puff up until they are shaped like a butt, creating the impression that your face is mooning the world.  Science fact.

In a (thus far mostly successful) attempt to avoid these outcomes, I've had to be really careful about what I eat.  I read labels now, which has made me basically Mr. Wizard at simple multiplication (40 calories per portion times 17 portions per can equals nice try, Kraft Foods Inc.) and also led me to try products that I probably would never have looked at before.  Some of them have turned out to be really great and helpful, so it bothered me a little that, had I not been put on a really unusual drug regimen, I never would have tried them.  I'm guessing that because so much effort is going into the quality of the product, these small companies just don't have the money to throw towards an advertising and marketing team that really knows what the kids want these days.  Using a combination of my considerable savvy and blingeez, I've generated new campaign ideas for a few of them.

The Tall Tale of Billy Reuben, Who History Will Recollect as Bein' "Yeller"

Wherein the scene inside my liver briefly becomes a spaghetti western.

For the most part, the outcomes of diagnosis and treatment have been interesting and exciting while the procedural aspects (testing, appointments, learning to interpret test results) have been incredibly mundane.  Even the biopsy and subsequent recovery was so clean and without incident that I remember thinking, as I completed the required "laying almost motionless on one side for two hours" period following surgery, that I should have either been on considerably fewer drugs for the procedure so that I could drive myself home and go about my day, or been on considerably more drugs so that I could reasonably enjoy my medically-ordained indolence.  Unfortunately, the dosage guidelines for anaesthetics and narcotics don't include consideration of how 3D your new TV at home is, or how many cartoons your Netflix streaming account gives you access to.

My one point of enjoyment among the procedural minutiae has been the genesis of one Billy Reuben, a real dirtbag and personal thorn in my (upper right) side since he emerged from a misunderstanding early in my treatment.

"No, it's *autoimmune* hepatitis, and I can't pass it on to you no matter how much I want to right now."

Wherein I give the timeline of developments leading up to this still-possibly-poor-decision of a blog.


Late this past March I started to get sore and tired.  This was surprising because in general at that point in the year I'm noticing an uptick in my energy and general gung-ho-ness.  By mid-April I was dealing with constant joint pain in my feet and ankles that at best made walking uncomfortable and at worst made it physically difficult to get out of bed in the morning - for the hour or so after I woke up, the pain was akin to any major injury I've had over the years to those joints.  I had started playing in an intramural kickball league in Philly and generally assumed that the soreness was the result of actually engaging in some physical activity after the long winter hibernation (which, this year, was made even more extreme by the completely batshit amounts of snow that fell on Philly and its surrounding area).  I assumed, given time, it would improve.

It didn't.

"It's called well-compensated cirrhosis." "How well, exactly, will I be compensated?"

I haven't been very successful over the past few months in finding what feels like an appropriate level of disclosure.  I'm sure there's an ideal - the exact amount of information to provide to friends and family without feeling guilty for keeping them in the dark or feeling awkward about what could be a really, really boring overshare.  I don't, however, have any idea what that ideal is.  Instead, I've taken a two-pronged approach of saying absolutely nothing to people I haven't seen recently or on a regular basis while simultaneously keeping the local crew painstakingly updated on minutiae like the down-titrating of my meds and which items on what menus will make my face go all puffy in the morning.  This seems unfair to the former group, and is probably annoying to the latter.  Meanwhile, there is a third unfortunate milieu composed of those who I don't see regularly but happen to run into.  These poor people have a tendency to ask how I've been, not suspecting that that question immediately sets off an internal coinflip between saying "Fine" and unspooling a convoluted story of medical intrigue beginning with "Well, it's been a weird (6,7,8) months." Heads I'm lying, tails I'm boring and kind of inappropriate.  No-win situation.

It's entirely possible that this failure to recognize and consistently utilize the correct amount of disclosure is the internet's fault - after a certain number of years of untagging pictures on Facebook, one's sense of what is public domain kind of steers into "Oh, what the hell" territory.  And honestly?  "Oh, what the hell" kind of seems like the most appropriate attitude to have right now.  So, starting from the beginning and until I get bored or seriously embarrass myself, I'm going to lay out here what's going on with me.