Unsolicited Advice

This is the pile of pills I knock back every morning to keep myself more or less functional. The long white 5500 pill and the two blue ones are painkillers: 500 mg acetaminophen (paracetamol outside the US), and 440 mg naproxen sodium. This is combining analgesics from two different families with two different mechanisms of action. They're both non-selective inhibitors of cyclooxygenase, but acetaminophen, a derivative of coal tar, seems to work mainly on the central nervous system, whereas NSAIDs like naproxen have a more peripheral action that includes anti-inflammatory effects. I try to be conservative with the Tylenol, as I like my liver and I do occasionally drink. Naproxen, I am more cavalier about, as it doesn't cause me any GI issues, and I rarely exceed the '3 pills in 24 hours' box instructions. Prescription naproxen for osteoarthritis is 500 mg q8-12h, which puts my usage well within standard therapeutic range.  Starting out with two naproxen instead of one i...

You may have noticed I've been AWOL a lot lately. This is because the roommate configuration of the apartment has changed, and I've had to pick up a lot more work. This sucks. Aside from taking up a lot more time, it means that even when I have free time, I tend to spend it staring at the wall, because I'm not really capable of doing anything else. Why am I so blank all the time? Observe the Tiredness/Fatigue Scale to the left. One of the symptoms of connective tissue disorders like Ehlers-Danlos is chronic fatigue. I don't think anyone noticed anything when I was a child, mainly because nobody was paying any attention, and when they were, they were busy approving of the way I camped in the corner with a book and had no discernible needs. It got pretty prominent when I was a teenager and people started trying to force me onto a more conventional 'adult life' schedule, which not coincidentally was when I started pushing back against people's expectations and ...