We cut my MS medication in half a few months ago because my immune system was plummeting. It held steady at 0.20 for … what … almost 20 years on the immunosuppressants? And then 0.18, 0.16 … and you can’t have that.
So with that medication tweak, the house of cards started slipping and an MS symptom crept in. I felt fatigue.
It wasn’t the overwhelming fatigue where you lie on the floor with your hands turned up because it takes too much effort to have your hands face down. But I did spend entire weekends in bed, and you can’t have that either.
So I started Provigil/modafinil, even though the new insurance refused to pay for it. (An aside, it costs $1,000 a month, but if you get a coupon off the Internet it costs $30? Is our economy built on that nonsense? Concerning.) Anyway, I was out in the garden a week later. I don’t know how it works. Not caffiene, not uppers, so what is it? What is the mechanism?
There will be other effects of cutting the MS meds in half, I’m sure. I blew past .20 lymphocytes and went up to .26 (normal is .80).
I’m getting my Covid booster shot soon. I wonder if I’ll feel those post-vaccine symptoms normal people do. I certainly don’t want to catch the new “Cicada” variant. (And when did we start giving scary names to variants? Concerning.)
I would worry about new lesions, but I have an MRI scheduled for August, so we’ll catch them then. That is if we still have MRIs, evidently the war in Iran is affecting the helium that MRIs need to function. Again, say it with me, concerning.
2 responses to “Health Summer 2026”
I’m glad you’ve gotten your immune system to stop slipping, but yes. Concerning.
Modafinil is supposed to stimulate the central nervous system but how it does that? No idea.
The way our economy works is definitely concerning, yes. Sometimes there are pharma rebates until they decide to stop giving them; sometimes there are Patient Assistance Programs; sometimes insurance just won’t pay for things even when they’re medically indicated. Some medications do legitimately cost a lot to make and transport and others are just inflated for extra profits, and also pharma profits are grotesque, but also we do want them to keep doing R&D, but also: again: grotesque profits even with what they *are* paying for R&D. Harrumph.
How we got here with names after Omicron is described in the wikipedia page for the Cicada subvariant and… weird: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BA.3.2#Nomenclature (basically the WHO decided to stop giving variants of concern a greek letter as it had been doing, which makes some sense as it’d eventually run out of greek letters and also the greek letters don’t say anything about the variant itself other than ‘this is the order, relative to other greek letter named covid variants, in which the WHO noticed them’).
Auuugh helium. I would like to assume everyone would divert the helium-balloon supplies to make sure we can still have MRIs but I cannot. But also, it will probably be figured out? Unless they decide to only have *some* MRI machines running and make patients have long wait times and travel farther for an MRI, which I suppose would be a sort of figuring out but not an acceptable one…
KC – How did I miss the Kraken variant? Also, I like this line: “On 6 December 2025, researchers named the BA.3.2 variant “Cicada”, paying homage to the insect’s long nymph period underground, which was similar to BA.3.2’s emergence pattern.”