The day after Christmas our family continued zooming each other on the TV because I had gifted my mom an escape room box that we all spent time working through together.

It was a lot of fun and reminded us all of the times we used to play board games after dinner when we used to all be living together.

I spent time doing some stamp making since one of my roommates had gifted me a stamp making kit. I enjoyed being able to spend my day doing more crafts since stopping eating (per my doctor’s recommendation) was making me begin to feel so much better and kept me from being immobilized again.

On December 27th I decided to clean my room and reorganize it a bit since I had been feeling better but unfortunately, I once again overestimated my energy and had tremors afterwards.

I had also gotten lab results that were published to my portal, but they were from a month ago (November 30th). The lab results said that I was anemic.

AHH YESS, the thing my dad and I had been fighting to explain to my doctors for months…..

The thing that sucked was I STILL wasn’t able to move up my infusion in January, but we thought it was fine since it would be the following month. We also figured that the anemia was contributing to a lot of my weird fatigue and lightheadedness symptoms.

On December 28th I went with my dad to the hospital to get my cervical spine MRI done. It went well (which was good because I had to call in advance to plan ahead for a private room to disconnect my TPN as soon as I went into the machine). I wasn’t super symptomatic being disconnected which was good, and the MRI took about 15 minutes.

On December 29th my dad and I both went to the hospital to get our next COVID vaccine booster since my doctor had cleared me and said I was now able to get the 3rd booster vaccine.

I knew that in the evening I was going to get allll of the symptoms because I am the queen of side effects. And surely enough, that evening I had a headache, dry heaving, vomiting, fever, chills, muscle aches, etc.

I was stuck in bed again because of how crappy the side effects made me feel.

That evening I had also gotten the results from my cervical spine MRI which had showed some mild spondylosis on my c4-c5 and c5-c6. It didn’t seem like much or anything particularly relevant so I was not very concerned and had to wait until my next appointment anyways to hear my doctor’s thoughts.

December 30th I still had a fever and was still vomiting so I just tried to rest as much as I could. The fever never went above 102 so I wasn’t concerned health-wise.

I was feeling ready for the vaccine symptoms to be over and to celebrate the upcoming new year!

Read about Emma’s New year’s in the story, “New Year, New Tubing”.