finals, Christmas, & lupus flare all at once!

First, I haven't been here in a bit due to semi-unforseen circumstances. The last couple weeks of the semester got a bit insane w/ the last minute tweaking of my final research project for English. See below and you'll get MOST of the research I did, minus some editing and revising. Thankfully that was the closest thing we had to an exam for that class as the others weren't particularly easy.lol. Had a ton of spreadsheets and databases to finish up besides studying for finals in my music aprec and office systems classes. The real bear though was that 3rd history exam. It wasn't a cummulative final but was really difficult to prepare for as over the last 3 & a half weeks of the semester we had crammed in about 500-600 years worth of European history including the Black Death, War of The Roses, 100 years War, Italian Renaissance, the French Civil War, & Christian Humanism. I am not Catholic, having grown up w/ a Baptist minister for a grandfather & Sunday school teacher grandmother but I could now tell you more than I ever cared to about the ups & downs of the Catholic Church, the Popes, Cardinals, and Bishops as well as the Babylonian Captivity of the Papacy and Concilliarism. I am sure all of this will come in useful to me as a science major. Not.

Of course at the same time I was wrapping up the semester there was also the getting ready for next semester- registration, trips to advising, making sure all of my transfer records finally got where they needed to, and taking to financial aid to make sure what I need to have ready to review my grants and loans. Plus (this part is very good!) my advisor emailed me a scholarship app she thinks I could get that would cover 75% of my tuition for NEXT semester! So now, I have that to do and get ready to turn back in as soon as she gets back in her office after Christmas.

Oh, and there was Christams to get ready for. Shopping to do, cleaning and getting stuff together to donate- clothes I don't wear, including some (alot!) I have never worn to go to Saint Vincents and a bunch of various new health and beauty supplies and some luxuries as well to send to the girls at Saint Jude's (women's half way house/rehab facility) and some for the Center For Women and Families. Wish I could do more but this year hasn't been easy, especially after getting laid off in march then going into my first major lupus flare in a very long time.

And that brings up the last part of why I have been away and haven't gotten the info I wanted to posted. I was sick with a minor stomach bug which made me pretty sick for about 2 days but in the process of fighting the virus along with alot of stress my immune system went into overdrive and so I have been fighting a flare and resisting the (probably smart) idea of putting myself back on the steroids for a week or 2. Yes, they help but they also are evil. The lupus picked my joints and gall bladder to attack this time so it's been really painful and close to impossible to eat anything more substantial than a banana or glass of SunnyD. On the plus side that could be a good way to not gain wait over the holidays, huh? My last infusion of Benlysta was given to me early b/c I had to skip the October infusion due to the flu and I wanted to make sure that if I had any issues/flare it wouldn't be til after finals. That theory worked but the result has been that just a few days after finals I started getting really sick. Just glad it wasn't durring finals!Also very glad that my infusion is at 12:30 this afternoon.

One last thing. Most people know I am on a study drug for lupus known as BenLysta or Lymphostat-B (bemulab) and I wanted to share an article I read. It was published before the Phase3 trial results were released but has some very interesting information in it. It also shows what LuAnne Novello said in her interview in an earlier post about sometimes Phase 2 trials can make it appear a drug is either more or less effective than in reality due to limited sample size. I just thought it was quite interesting and worth sharing. Let me know what ya think! http://bit.ly/5ZH8Tr