[PREREQUISITE: BIOCHEM I; or permission of instructor]
I am noticing some other aspects of changing body chemistry, after the new HIV medications....
For several years, I have tended to get frequent bleeding, and clotting, in my sinuses. This has been worse since my 2009 stroke, and a subsequent three months of the dreadful medication Warfarin (avoid that one if you can); it's gotten so that it is perfectly normal for me to spit blood clots mornings, during showers, etc.
That recalls periods of frequent nosebleeds in the 1980s and 1990s... I occasionally tell my students the story of being the Emcee in a suburban Marin County production of Cabaret; one night, as I was nervously preparing my Solo Entrance (you know the one, on a darkened stage with one pinpoint spot, the scene that climaxes with 'Even the orchestra is beautiful!'), my nose suddenly, and definitely, started bleeding. Two tall chorus girls holding me up, another one rushing to get the stage manager to hold the lights and the orchestra to vamp... and the bleeding stopped: I waved them all away and went out to give what, at least from my light-headed point of view, seemed a properly, exceptionally macabre version of the opening scene.
As for that Warfarin – it is really a rat poison: it kills rats by thinning their blood so much that they die of internal bleeding. And now they give it to older people who have had any kind of stroke or heart problem... because it's very cheap, and keeps it all from clotting. I always have the feeling that the medication only gets used because older people feel ill anyway, and don't get to win arguments with younger doctors who might prescribe something else if they had to take the damned toxic stuff themselves.
In any case, just lately, my sinuses aren't bleeding: so, perhaps, my new medications don't have that side effect...
And then there's the psoriasis. I've had psoriasis since I was 18; it was far worse in the late 1980s and intermittently in the 1990s, in a way that doctors linked to a damaged immune system, low t-cell count, and possibly simply the presence of the virus. It hasn't been terrible for the past decade, but it doesn't go away either – at all.
Except, lately, it is noticeably thinner, lighter, fading – we'll see how it goes
And I suspect that my mood, and mental focus and processing, are much more positive/stronger also. Admittedly I am having headaches, fairly frequently; but as I've only been taking the new medications for just over two weeks, perhaps those will decrease or vanish. All of these changes might be happening partly because it's spring (well, sort of – we've gone back to temperatures in the high 40s/low 50s here); but it seems to be more than that –
perhaps the new medications give me a few minor reprieves: in addition to the major ones, of course.
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