Peeking into the rock

No, I haven't been to the physical therapist yet, I'm waiting for my Covered California insurance to kick in. But I decided to do a little research on statin-induced myopathy and I have found a trove of scientific articles written for physical therapists in a journal called Physical Therapy (PTJ). These articles are available in full online. No pay wall, no membership requirement. You only need to know what to search for. This is so different from other things I have tried to search for in the past. Also,at least to a cursory glance, there seem to be more women authors in this journal. More than half, even.

I have no special news to report except that statin damage does seem to be reversible so that the pain and weakness I still have is either not from that (and some of it is definitely from osteoarthritis) or will recede as I exercise more and lose some more weight. I have learned a lot more about the chemistry and genetics of the situation, but it's not stuff I can articulate, since the articles I have been reading are at the edge of what I can follow.

Here is one of the articles I read.

And here is an older one.

On another, tangentially-related front, it appears my old dog needs anti-inflammatories as a regular thing now too. She started them for an apparent muscle injury in her shoulder -- not on the side with the deformed leg -- and after she seemed to have been better for a long time I took her off them. Two days later she developed a limp again and starfted acting sad and tentative too. So I put her back on: a day later and she was racing around, playing with toys, and trying to instigate rough play at the dog park. So I'll be talking to the vet as soon as I can and getting that set up as a permanent regime. She'll be twelve in two days, which is getting up there for a 55-pound dog. I think biologically we are about the same age, really.

Further tangent: earlier this week, my father would have been eighty-five. I went to search a picture for you, and google autocorrected my search for Luis Kemnitzer to Luis Camnitzer. It is amusing that there should be another old guy out there with such a similar name, but google should not have autocorrected my search when the name I am searching is my very own last name. Don't tell me google doesn't know who's searching. I wouldn't mind the "did you mean . . ." suggestion, but autocorrect is the opposite of useful. I did send them feedback. So should ytou, everytime google autocorrects. It's the only possible way to get them to stop it.

Well, here's my father and my stepmother a long time ago, when they posed for the "hotties of harm reduction" calendar. It's in Jim Haber's photostream, and he has all rights reserved, which I believe is a bit odd considering everything.

So The Drummer Boy is reaching draft status. I'm closing in on the last chapters. I took some time off to revise the earlier chapters and I've made notes for some further revisions, but I'm feeling ready to hear what other people have to say about it. It's long enough, and I'm close enough to the end, that I am pretty confident that by the time you're ready for the last chapters, they'll be written.

If you're interested, comment or message me, and I'll send you the link to the folder.

In other news, I've suspended taking simvastatin in a desperate measure to stop my legs hurting and this seems to have worked in a limited fashion, so an important task when I get back is to figure out how to get back on some other kind of statin regime (either reduced dose or a different type), because the statistics in favor of statin use are really quite conclusive. As to the limitation -- the really quite severe and puzzling muscle pains I was having since my arrival in Prague have just about disappeared -- but now I am having actual knee pain, as in obviously the arthritis. I can't catch a break. I have, however, at least according to Hana's bathroom scale, lost almost six kilos, which would please me more if it hadn't been in less than a month. I am not certain of this, naturally, as the scale weighs very heavy compared to the doctor's scale back home, in fact it just now says that I weigh a bit less than when I left. I do know I have lost some weight though as my clothes are hanging off me, which is disconcerting. anyway, the point is, or was back there before I got sidetracked about weight, that my leg pain is clearly multifactorial, and I've been identifying and dealing with one factor at a time. I identified fascitis and muscle spasm, and physical therapy dealt with that (I still do exercises and self-massage for that). I identified arthritis, and put that on hold as the muscle stuff seemed to keep the pain at bay and I lost any method of paying for surgery. Then the pain came back and I seem to have identified this other thing with the statin and also to have crossed some new threshold with the arthritis.

The one thing I know about the pain is that I need exercise and rest, more of one or the other depending on the day.

It is enormously hot here in Prague -- like record breaking some days. Combined with the arthritis acting up I am glad I did a lot of my sightseeing and research already because I can't do so much of it right now.