Why I didn't take a trip this month

I suppose this is why I intuitively knew not to go on the month-long trip to Nicaragua this month.

I haven’t been feeling that well these past few days so ended up going to the doctor yesterday. It’s what I suspected – since I’ve lowered the prednisone dose, my symptoms have returned. When I saw the rheumatologist in mid-November I was on 80mg of prednisone and he said that it was suppressing the symptoms and that we would basically have to wait and see what happens. And then when the temporal artery biopsy came back negative, his note to my GP said that although he suspects giant cell arteritis, without the confirmation of the biopsy, he can’t verify it.

So I “waited and saw” and I began to feel like I had when Mick was here, with the headaches, chest pain and a new one, blurred vision. Now I’m back up to 30mg for a few days, then down to 20mg as a maintenance dose for a while. I have to take Fosamax, a medication that helps prevent osteoporosis which, from the little research I have done, doesn’t have too many side affects, but will do more checking.

This is all very frustrating, as I felt so much better, getting my energy back and just generally all-aroung, better. But the one good thing about this is that 90-percent of the people who have this giant cell arteritis get over it in an average of 23 months, some as soon as six-months. So it will go away eventually.