{"id":445,"date":"2020-06-27T20:56:23","date_gmt":"2020-06-27T20:56:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/keithalanwriter.com\/wordpress\/?p=445"},"modified":"2020-06-27T20:56:23","modified_gmt":"2020-06-27T20:56:23","slug":"virus-etc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/keithalanwriter.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/2020\/06\/27\/virus-etc\/","title":{"rendered":"Virus, Etc."},"content":{"rendered":"

This is a good news \/ bad news sort of thing.\u00a0 Good news is I did get a job, fairly quickly AND with a 40% pay increase.\u00a0 The bad news is my ‘creeping malaise’ has been identified as chronic fatigue<\/a>, or, more scarily, Myalgic encephalomyelitis, and now I’ll be out of a job again.\u00a0 It’s an explanation for why I’ve been feeling so poorly the last nearly year and half, not to mention progressively getting worse.\u00a0 Some relatively good news is my employer has short-term and long-term disability and, assuming they don’t jerk me around (haven’t heard back from the insurance agent yet), I should be able to provide for my family without making changes to our lifestyle.\u00a0 If I do get screwed, then draconian barely begins to describe what’ll have to happen to our lifestyle, starting with selling our ‘ranch’ in the country.\u00a0 Fingers crossed that won’t happen.<\/p>\n

The way CF is diagnosed is by exclusion.\u00a0 Basically, the doctors try every test they can think of, results come back negative (meaning nothings wrong), but they still believe me.\u00a0 I’ve had a complete cardiac workup, including being injected with, I’m sure, more radioactivity than I used working nearly 7 years in a laboratory, 2.5 of those years in the lab that used more radioactivity than the entire rest of the (Virginia Tech) campus combined (or so I was told).\u00a0 Since I’m an old fat white man, it made perfect sense to check that, but, alas, I was given a clean bill of health.\u00a0 Same for pulmonary, nerve tests (quite painful!), MRI of my head, hormone checks (though low on testosterone).\u00a0 I’m sure I’ve ‘donated’ a quart or more of blood with all these tests.<\/p>\n

A common complaint along with the fatigue is fuzzy thinking, or mental fog.\u00a0 Looking back at my blog posts when we went to Germany for a week last June, the mental effects were already present, just not to the degree I could recognize as an issue.\u00a0 That started to change a few months ago, I was actually thinking I was developing dementia.\u00a0 The ‘senior moments,’ coupled with an interesting\/terrifying dream, prompted me to start writing a screenplay inspired by the thoughts I was having, but it wound up short at 50 pages and I have (so far) lacked the focus to work on the excellent suggestions my editor made.<\/p>\n

It was a coincidental reminder of CF that triggered a reread of the symptoms and when I saw ‘mental fog’ I realized that was most likely the problem.\u00a0 I reached out to my GP and, after a few more tests and visits to specialists, she agreed I had CF.\u00a0 She put me on a drug that’s supposed to help with the mental fog of CF patients (Cymbalta<\/a>, if you care), but things seemed to get worse.\u00a0 I was told by the doctor and my lovely wife (a research nurse) to suck it up, butter cup (well, they might have been a bit more polite), it can take 4-6 weeks<\/em><\/strong> to find out if it has any benefit.\u00a0 Oh joy.\u00a0 Well, one of the specialists I met with is a psychiatrist, someone who specializes in these exotic drugs, and she felt I’d do better combining with yet another drug, Lamictal<\/a>, which has some scary potential side effects.\u00a0 More ‘suck it up’ from the wife, so I started that.\u00a0 Shockingly (not), I was worse after I started it.\u00a0 As I write this, I feel slightly<\/strong><\/em> better able to think, but still struggle reading or writing, or, really, much of anything besides watching TV, then taking a nap when that gets too exhausting.<\/p>\n

So what does this mean for my movie making ‘career’?\u00a0 If (and I sometimes feel that’s a real ‘if’) I can regain some level of mental acuity (I have, a few times here and there, felt lucid for as long as a couple of hours, but have yet to find a way to be productive during those brief intervals), I intend to write again (screenplays as well as novels) and, perhaps, do some programming for a game I’ve wanted to write for a couple of decades and some biotech research, the reason I got a biochem degree in the first place.\u00a0 Directing, though, I think will be entirely beyond me, unless some magic happens and I can recover from the fatigue (I don’t think I’ve been awake 8 hours continuous in over 4 months).\u00a0 Producing is a possibility, at least in the preproduction stage, where being awake on other people’s schedule is less critical.<\/p>\n

Where does that leave Treasure Hunt<\/a> and my other projects? Well, I found two volunteers in England to help me with it, for credit.\u00a0 For audio, I got Jamie Stowe (didn’t find anything to link to online) and he reworked most of the flick (except the begin and end credits).\u00a0 He suggested Jamie Bulman<\/a> (pretty sure that’s his website) to do coloring.\u00a0 The good news is they both got their material back to me.\u00a0 The bad news is I’m too addle headed to do anything useful with it to this point.\u00a0 I did have a movie making friend look at the colored version (Jamie B.) and sent me a few frames of before and after and we agreed there was improvement, but at this point I’m too scatterbrained to do anything more with it.\u00a0 Hopefully the drugs will reach a point where I can focus long enough to get something done (this post, while lengthy, was a pain to write – I misspell words I used to type correctly and sometimes forget what point I had halfway through a sentence; conversation can be even weirder than usual as the exact same thing happens, but I can’t go back and edit before saying it).\u00a0 If so, I’ll finally create the DVDs I owe the crowd funders.<\/p>\n

I was working on a short, called “Fuck Retirement,” that’s on indefinite hold, as is my Lily’s Party<\/a> horror.\u00a0 I was working with an actress intending to be writer\/director for her short (well, I did write it), but, even when the virus has blown over, I doubt I can continue.\u00a0 Even my billion-dollar energy idea languishes in limbo, I can’t seem to do a damn thing.\u00a0 Even if I can think again, I don’t know that I’ll ever have the energy to direct, even if we keep the days short and I sit most of the time.<\/p>\n

So, there you go.\u00a0 Totally too much information.\u00a0 But at least those handful of people that have been wondering why I’ve been so damn quiet can now have an explanation.\u00a0 Even if it doesn’t explain anything.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is a good news \/ bad news sort of thing.\u00a0 Good news is I did get a job, fairly quickly AND with a 40% pay increase.\u00a0 The bad news is my ‘creeping malaise’ has been identified as chronic fatigue, or, more scarily, Myalgic encephalomyelitis, and now I’ll be out of a job again.\u00a0 It’s … Continue reading “Virus, Etc.”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,12,1,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-445","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-directing","category-treasure-hunt","category-uncategorized","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/keithalanwriter.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/445","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/keithalanwriter.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/keithalanwriter.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/keithalanwriter.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/keithalanwriter.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=445"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/keithalanwriter.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/445\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":446,"href":"https:\/\/keithalanwriter.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/445\/revisions\/446"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/keithalanwriter.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=445"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/keithalanwriter.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=445"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/keithalanwriter.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=445"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}