The Walking Dead

 Once again it has been a long while since I visited my blog, mostly because I have been sick as a dog. Well, not mostly. Totally. Always.

First there was the stroke. Then I managed to get a sinus infection on top of it, which then turned into regular incredibly stubborn sinusitis. I'm sure that some of you have experienced the same thing.

So there have been a series of doctors and emergency room visits and so on. I can tell you that if you live in Indonesia you might as well just suffer at home, because if you go to the emergency room you will find yourself suffering unattended in a non-air conditioned, humid, sweltering hell, where no one, by the way, knows any damn thing. I've said it before and I'll say it again: Patient heal thyself.

But I'm not done. Just before Christmas I lost the air conditioning in my house and naturally there was no one available to come and fix it. For days. Louis and Wayne were very kind to  invite me to stay in the spare room at their home, which of course has functioning AC. Nonetheless, one would prefer to be in his own home. They were very gracious, but I couldn't help but feel that I was interrupting their holiday season.

So this broken AC situation went on for days and then more than a week. Even when we got a service man to come out and look at it, he couldn't really figure out what was wrong. So he just kind of made up things to make it look like he knew what he was doing, and then left.

Today, already January 5th, a repairman has actually got the unit running, but God knows how long it will continue to run. Fingers crossed.

I should have mentioned, as a prefatory remark, that the weather here has been unusually hot, practically unlivable even with AC.

Given all of these difficulties, I have hardly had time to learn how to live with a stroke or how to go about recovering from a stroke. Because basically I've just been lying in one bed or another like death warmed over.

Ah, and then there was the resurgence of my longstanding neck and shoulder pain. It became very painful indeed the other day and Wayne finally convinced me to see a chiropractor he had seen in the past with satisfaction. I have spoken about this pain to my doctor and he believes that it could be a frozen muscle beneath the shoulder blade. This, he says, could be relieved with an intramuscular injection. However, an MRI would first need to be done to prove that this is indeed the problem rather than something else like bony injury. And that of course costs money. And I just got done doing a head CT. Which also cost money. Not to mention the money I have paid to neurologists and ENT doctors and pharmacies. Sheesh.

So anyway today I saw the chiropractor, a very personable and seemingly professional German fellow. He took my history and listened and poked around and pushed this way in that, and then said, curiously enough, "I don't think you had a stroke. I think you just have MS".

And you know what? I think he might be right. I thought the same thing from the beginning.

But with all this discouraging news, I will end by saying, at the risk of jinxing myself, that I seem now to be on the mend. God willing.

I hope everyone out there had a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Mine didn't just suck, it just simply didn't exist.

Looking forward to Christmas 2024!