The past few days, being off the ranatadine were pretty bad. My face was swollen, the rash came back (albeit much less than originally, at the onset of all this), and I had very poor heat tolerance, which affected my sleep. I'm saying all this in past tense, although I'm not completely recovered yet.
After my appointment with the allergy doctor this afternoon I could resume all my allergy medicines, plus another one he's prescribing but my insurance doesn't want to cover. So far I've just taken my dinner-time ranatadine, but my facial swelling is already greatly decreased. Maybe tomorrow night I'll be able to sleep with the CPAP again.
The allergy doctor didn't seem sure what caused this, but he suggested that Lyrica, which I take for fibromyalgia, can cause some of these symptoms. He talked about maybe me having to get off of it for a couple weeks to see if that helped my symptoms. Of course, this alarmed me because if I get off Lyrica there are not a lot of options regarding what to replace it with, and most of them I already know I can't take. Savella is the only one we discussed that I haven't tried and don't know how I'd tolerate it and/or how effective it would be for me. Just being off Lyrica for 2 weeks would probably have effects that would go a lot longer than 2 weeks because it very likely would trigger a fibro flare. But I don't know for sure yet, that I'll have to get off the Lyrica.
The other thing that is really troubling is this weakness I've developed in the past couple weeks. I am hoping that if we can get this allergy thing taken care of that will also resolve itself, since it started shortly after the allergy symptoms started. But I haven't heard anyone say that weakness is particularly a symptom of allergy, or fibromyalgia, for that matter. My primary care doctor wanted to x-ray my back to see if there's anything going on there. Just what I need, another health problem. Isn't it enough that I have an allergy problem? Evidently not. Anyway, as I resume my allergy medicine and those symptoms subside, if the weakness doesn't also diminish, then I guess I'll have to accept the real possibility that that's something different going on.
As you can guess, I haven't been able to look at any of my life history materials. It's all I can do to deal with the present, including financial and (car and health) insurance problems too.
I haven't done a lot of cooking either, except to make tortillas for the fajita fillings I'd made and last night I made a recipe for cantaloupe muffins. I tried a new tortilla recipe and I liked it a lot. The muffin recipe was a bit of a disappointment though. I mean they tasted okay but I think there was too much fat content in them, they were hard to get out of the pan, and you couldn't really even taste the cantaloupe in them. Because of the novelty of cantaloupe muffins, I could be tempted to make the recipe again, but there are so many changes I'd make that it would almost be easier to use a different recipe altogether and tweak it to use cantaloupe puree for the liquid. I had some mixed dried peaches and cantaloupe (from last year's dehydrating) so I added those in and that was a nice addition. The tortillas required no tweaking.
~ Meg
