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| Dartmoor 2022 Some rare sun. |
You know how it is; there's something at the back of your mind that you feel you really should do but you don't quite get round to doing it. And so when I looked back at this blog page it was a bit of a shock that no new posts have appeared for well over a year. (I'm pretty sure I did a bit of tidying up behind the scenes since then, but it's a poor excuse). I don't have an enormous amount to say, which is why there has been such an update drought, but I did manage to miss my own anniversary of a decade since being diagnosed with (probable) CLIPPERS in 2011. I've partly been prompted to write here after a nice email from a fellow CLIPPERS patient who hoped in passing that the blog silence didn't mean anything bad had happened.
Since the last post I've managed not to catch COVID helped by working almost exclusively from home and by taking every vaccine offered. The booster program is a little random here but they seem to be erring on the side of caution as I've had two initial jabs (Astra-Zeneca) and three Pfizer "boosters". I felt pretty mouldy for a day or so after the second Pfizer one but took more care with hydration and ibuprofen after the third which seemed to help. CLIPPERS symptoms have remained absent and I've now been taking Azathioprine for ten years which is not ideal but probably better than the alternative.
I very recently had my annual neurology appointment in London. It was strange travelling in to the centre on the train for only the third or fourth time in the last couple of years when I used to do the journey most weekdays. My status was reviewed by the same neurologist I saw when I was first diagnosed and I was judged to be stable. There's always the question about whether I want to stop the medication and I ask "what are the risks of relapse and what would be the consequences if I came off it" and no-one really knows; so I stay on the medication as it's kept me well so far. I'll get another MRI in due course to provide an up-to-date reference in case there are any changes further down the line.
Hopefully it won't be so long before the next post. I hope everyone out there is staying as well as possible.
Read other articles in this series at Living With CLIPPERS.
Living With CLIPPERS by Bill Crum is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
