...After being dormant since October 2009, I've decided it's time to revive OMBlog. For those wondering why I went on such a long hiatus, for the most part it had to do with health issues. While I was active on some other forums such as Rich Johnston's Bleeding Cool and the Secret Projects Forums, and doing what I could to get my 30-year High School Reunion going via Facebook, I simply ended up not having the stamina to put all the work in that OMBlog required. It took a lot to create each of those entries, and my declining health wasn't helping any.
...The health issues reached it's nadir over the past few months, as I wound up contracting Choleostatic Hepatitis. CH is not one of those forms of Hepatitis that you get from using dirty needles or contaminated seafood or unprotected sex. The main cause is usually a harmful interaction between two drugs, one of them normally being a statin. As for the other drug, Promethazine was the other culprit, a stomach medication I'd been prescribed after Christnukkah 2010 following another vomiting bout and a trip to the ER. Treatment for CH usually involves ceasing to take the drugs and taking rather large doses of ursodiol to essentially kickstart the liver back into action and get enzyme levels back to normal, which takes anywhere from 2-3 months under normal conditions.
...But, as you probably expected, there wasn't anything normal to my condition. The liver failure was not only due to two drugs not getting along when mixed in the liver, but I'd also contracted a parasite that is found in newborn kittens. The parasite very, very, very rarely passes from cats to humans, but as those of you who followed me on Facebook know, between September 2010 and February 2011, I'd had a half-dozen kittens die on me. And every single one of them died from that parasite.
...Now, the problem is that contracting this parasite is so damn rare that when I went all jaundiced and all the anti-vomiting medicines - especially the Promethazine - weren't working, The doctors couldn't figure out why my liver wasn't coming back online after the Statin and the Promethazine were dropped from my prescription regimen, and my skin color continued to be best described as "Homer Simpson Yellow".The first EMS team that responded to my uncontrollable vomiting call actually described my skin color in those words in their report, and had I been shaving my head again I probably would have passed for Homer.
...Meanwhile, back at the hospital, everyone was scratching their heads in conbefuddlement as to my continued liver malfunction. That is, until one of the doctors of the third team that treated me at Brackenridge suggested the possibility of my having contracted this parasite after we'd discussed all the kitty scratches I had on my arms - an unavoidable hazard when dealing with kittens, alas. However, the quack who led the team shot that one down, claiming it was "so rare that it's considered impossible". In addition to his stopping all my pain meds - more on that in a future post, kids - he flatly refused to order up a specific biopsy test to check for the parasite. After some heated argument and demanding a second opinion from a different team lead - one I'd dealt with previously when I got "Stumpy" back in 2008 - I managed to get the biopsy and my pain meds reinstated.
...Now, once the biopsy was done, it took them 72 hours to run the tests that were specific for the parasite, as it's so rare the biopsy lab has to order special test materials. Having gotten the vomiting controlled, they sent me home to wait for the results. No surprise that they found the parasite, but at a low enough of a level of infection that the best guess was that I was on the trailing end of the infection due to my immune system finally being able to deal with it. The only problem was that I kept having those uncontrollable vomiting bouts about every 2-3 weeks.
...Once again, the doctors were confused, so they stuck with the usual treatment - Reglan, Zofran, Dilauded and Vicodin - until my stomach settled down and they sent me home after 3-4 days of pain and nausea. Then, last month, I wound up going to Seton instead of Brack because the Brack ER was swamped - two bad wrecks and a couple of drug thug gangs having a turf war - and wound up with a new doctor with a new outlook on my condition. This guy had been doing his own research into Gastrophoresis, and found that in certain cases the uncontrollable vomiting may not be directly linked to high blood sugar. In all but two of the nine times I was in the ER from February to May, my sugar readings were within tolerance. In cases such as this, the medical term that's now being used is Cyclic Vomiting Syndrome, and the treatment is identical to what's been prescribed every time chuck decides to up...with one exception. The initial treatment calls for a shot of either Morphine or Dilauded, preceded by a shot of Atavan.
The effect was so positive that the nausea and the pain went away like someone turned off a light switch.
...Anyway, I now have a "magic bullet" that appears to work the miracle I need when the urge to cyclically vomit arises. The trick is to keep the Atavan down long enough to shut things down and allow me to give the other stomach meds a chance to work. So far, there's been two attempts by my digestive system to go haywire, and the Atavan has performed as advertised. The pill form doesn't work as fast as a shot, but it does work. In fact, it worked well enough that three hours later I was able to keep both food and drink down with no problems.
...Otay, so that's where I stand health-wise. I'm getting better slowly, and I still have to take it easy and avoid alcohol at least for the next six months, which'll rule out getting plastered on New Year's Eve. But it's better than the alternative, no?
...Now, all of you are wondering why OMWorld is shut down and OMBlog is in the process of moving to Blogger. The fault there lies on the shoulders of Prismnet. Having been one of Prismnet's longest customers - twelve years - and having brought just under three dozen customers to their hosting services during that time, I had an understanding regarding billing for their hosting OMWorld. However, as I've recently discovered, the guys who own Prismnet are apparently splitting up, and any special billing arrangements made during the Illuminati Online days - me being one, of course - were no longer being honored.
...So you probably can imagine how pissed I was when they cut off my e-mail and shut down OMWorld and my other sites when the bill was only 30 days past due. Especially when I was stuck in the hospital and needed to access my e-mail in order to deal with trying to get my Social Security Disability approved. Quite a few documents needed to be sent to my attorney, and the Word DOC files were too large for all of the free e-mail services.
...To add insult to injury, the idiot beancounter at Prismnet not only refused to take my medical condition into account and reactivate my e-mail account, he was damn rude about the matter. He demanded that I pay at least six months in advance via credit card, which was not an option for me at the time as my cards were at home. After further discussion on the matter, the bozo adamantly refused to provide any assistance in the matter, refused to let me talk to Jody, the primary owner of Prismnet, and then terminated the call after reasserting that "any and alll agreements made during the IO days are now null and void".
...The whole matter of my old e-mail address was made moot at the start of this month, however.. As it turns out, one of the side effects of the internal squabbles at Prismnet was that they let the io.com domain lapse. Those having IO accounts were given two weeks' notice that they would be transferred to a Prismnet address, and from what I've gathered from others who had io.com accounts all inquiries as to what the frack was going on were either ignored or responded to with the same notice that every IO account would be either transferred to the Prismnet domain, or simply terminated. Needless to say quite a few customers told Prismnet to go fuck themselves..
...So that's why I decided to try Blogger. It's free, I can transfer all my old OMBlog posts with the same date as when they were originally posted, and it allows something that I wasn't able to provide with the old HTML version: a comments section for each post! Most of my regular OMBloggers have in the past had to comment directly to me in e-mail, but now they can post their comments for all to see. Which could be interesting considering how controversial I can get at times. Especially when it concerns schmucks like Harlan Ellison or that anti-NASA moron we have in the White House. But what the hey? I've been dealing with flame wars onliine since before some of you were born. A Flame War veteran. That's me!
...Well, this post's gone on pretty long, so I'd better cut it off here. If you stuck around for the whole thing, thanks for listening. Next post will try to get back into the spirit of OMBlog that all of you have come to expect. And speaking of posts, over the next few weeks I'll be transferring as much of the old OMBlog entries over to the Blogger account. It's not a simple cut-and-paste situation as I've found, and the formatting's a bit different, so it'll take some time. Especially sorting out the posts that were mostly administrative and don't really apply over here on Blogger.
...Oh, before I forget, those wondering about my other websites - especially the Columbia Loss FAQ - they'll be back as soon as I find a proper hosting service. I'd settle for a free host so long as they don't force pr0n ad banners on me. So I'm open to suggestions on a web host, so if you've got any ideas...well, you can now leave a comment! Ain't web technology grand?
