This and that..........

RECENT ACTIVITY AND HEALTH STATUS.......

Recently, life has been interesting. I'm taking an online course which entails about 10hrs of work a week (once I start working on the assignments, probably more). Then I'm teaching two hours a week. With prep and assignments this will probably work out to about 10 hours a week as well. That's 20 hours of work a week! The good part is only about 4-5 hours of this time involves me needing to be out of the house....the rest I can do at home in bed. However, since I'm still not functioning at my "normal" I decided that if things don't improve by Friday, I'm going to make some changes....not sure what they will be, but I might have to find a way to further limit my activity to avoid a real major relapse (see previous post).

ON ORTHOSTATIC INTOLERANCE.......

I've had a tough week health-wise. I've been pretty weak and I'm running a low grade fever. Also, I've had lots of dizzy spells with a worsening of my Orthostatic Intolerance (OI). My bouts of OI are directly related to my CFS/M.E. status. I say this because a doctor once told me it was due to deconditioning. If that were true, the OI would get worse when I've had a long bad patch and have had to spend lots of time in bed. However, this is not the case. Instead, if I've had a couple good weeks and I've been fairly active, and I then have a crash, it gets instantly worse the first day of the crash. After I rest (spend lots of time in bed - e.g. decondition) the OI starts to improve again.

For those who don't know what orthostatic intolerance is, I'll give a very brief description. When I go from laying down to standing, from sitting to standing, or (worst) from squatting to standing, I get a major head rush/black out and occasionally completely pass out. It's do to the fact that my blood pressure (which in a person without OI typically regulates itself when that person changes position) instead drops. I have a fairly low BP to begin with (at least since my illness onset). The last two times I checked, my systolic was below 100.

ON ART......

I've been too busy to do art lately, which has been an outlet for me since becoming ill. It's not the end of the world, but yesterday I walked around the block with Teagan and took my camera. My goal was to find and photograph (artistically if possible) any beauty I saw. I've posted a few of my shots here.