It’s been a tough month on the personal front, with several factors coalescing together to create a turbulent September.
This won’t be my usual “Resilience Report”—there’s too much going on for me to allocate energy to writing a long-winded update this month. But I want to be consistent with publishing these reports, hence pulling together something short for today.
Maybe if I get a chance in the week ahead, I’ll come back and fill this post in with more details.
But for now, here are the things of note this month:
- I received my 5th Rituximab infusion. After discussing my case closely with my neurologist, we decided to put me on a 3-month interval going forward. After my spring autoimmune encephalitis relapse, I don’t want to take any risks with B cell repopulation. This one came about 4 months after my previous one in May.
- I completed a neuropsychological assessment, meant to provide insight into how the various facets of my cognition are functioning. I don’t have my results back yet; when I do, I plan to write a blog post about the experience and what information I gained from it.
- I’ve arranged to travel back home to Canada, after spending the past months in Texas. I’m not sure how long I will be back yet, but I’m sure this will become more clear as October rolls on.
And now for the big question…. how am I doing?
Well, I think I’m ending this month feeling about the same as last month. Overall, maybe about 65-70% of my baseline level of functioning. Not the best, not the worst. But since I’m now 5.5 months out from when I was put back on Rituximab (after my relapse), I’m starting to wonder more about what’s going on with my immune system and what’s different between my recovery in autumn 2019 vs. my recovery post-spring 2020. Maybe emotional stress is at play?
I’m hoping a change of scenery and being back home in familiar territory will accelerate some of the cognitive recovery… guess we’ll see!
In any case, I’ve got my fingers crossed I’ll be feeling up to pumping out more posts during October 🤞 for now, that’s all I got!
This post is part of my Monthly Resilience Report series. You can find last month’s here.
