Anything that comes from 1984 seems to have rung true far later (Thanks Mr. Orwell), and these particular sentiments really ring true to me these days.

Continuing along on the “strange days” theme:  I’m taking part in a health study and part of it is to monitor my blood pressure, which since my sleeve surgery, has been great (weight loss when one has been corpulent = great physical improvement). Over the past week or so I noticed an uptick and while the times certainly can contribute to it, I was still concerned as going down the Covid rabbit hole, I noticed hypertension as a possible increased risk factor. I called my primary care doctor’s office and we had a tele-med conference last week, at which time we agreed that I should return to a very low dose of the hypertension med I was taking prior to sleeve surgery, just to see if it would help and to monitor if it was a long term necessity based upon age alone (yeah, getting older does suck, however the alternative is not nearly as good). So, I started taking it just as I had for years prior to the sleeve surgery. A strange thing happened….that very night, I noticed a rash developing on my neck, when I got up in the middle of the night all itchy, I noticed a rash developing elsewhere as well. I immediately assumed that it had to do with a sudden reaction to having just done laundry and having put freshly laundered sheets on the bed as well as wearing freshly laundered clothes. What did I do, the only thing that made sense…I rewashed everything in just water, and double rinsed fully expecting it to remediate the issue. Well….not so much…the next morning it was even worse, fortunately I had some hydrocortisone cream so that helped a bit, but I kept reading and lo and behold, one of the side effect of the med I was again taking was, you guessed it, hives, a rash, swelling etc. In fact, this side effect, [totally unexpected as remember, it was exactly the same med that I had been on prior] was listed as the MOST dangerous and life threatening (no I was not having trouble breathing or was overly swollen, thankfully).

It took me three days to piece it together and, of course, by that time it was the weekend. Try to get to a doc on a weekend normally tough, today, impossible, so I went looking for some antihistamine to help with the itching, NOPE, also no more 24 hour accessibility to pharmacies in these strange days, so I was left high and dry and itchy and scratchy I also stopped taking the suspect medicine. Luckily(?) we had some 5 year old prednizone so I did take some (self medicating a talent, not necessarily a virtue) and it did seem to help a bit. However, keep in mind the start of this journey was to mitigate some blood pressure concerns and prednizone does the exact opposite. My doctor’s office was very good getting back to me on Monday morning from a message I had left on their patient portal and  did agree that very likely, but very strangely, all evidence pointed to this particular med being the prime suspect and that I did the right thing by stopping it. They also said that the prednizone could not possibly have helped as it was too old [empirical evidence begs to disagree]. They prescribed another hypertension med that I will start taking when it arrives and we’ll keep on eye on that for a few weeks.

Today, 3 days after stopping the offending med, the itch and rash have significantly abated, though there is still some, I did manage to get Benadryl and have taken that since yesterday and have found it to be very helpful….

Bottom line: Having a significant and relatively severe adverse reaction to a very low dose of a medicine I was taking for years (and in fact, was prescribed as an alternative to one that had given me “kennel cough” prior) really fits in to the “strange days” indeed theme…