It seemed too good to be true after my last post, and it was.  Within days I had relapsed after finishing the last course of Bactrim my symptoms were back, worse than ever.  So bad, that I had a trip to hospital courtesy of an ambulance which had to be called because I was in so much pain.  Oh sweet, sweet morphine, you are a cruel mistress.

The Bactrim was only holding the Bartonella at bay, it seems. My LLMD has now put me on a month’s worth of Ciprofloxacin, after verifying that a sore tendon was not too damaged.  Why do that?  Well, Cipro screws up tendons and ligaments if you take it too long so I had to verify that things were OK to start with.  I also have to take it easy and not exert myself too much in case I damage weakened tendons.

The one piece of good news is that a recent endoscopy showed no fungal infection from all the antibiotics I’ve been taking.  Unfortunately an echo test on my heart still shows a lot of fluid in the pericardial sac and I still have a huge amount of pain there which keeps me awake at night.

Because of all this, I am sad to be missing a work function in Austin this week, but it would have been foolish to travel with the tendon risk (moving my luggage would be a problem), my high levels of fatigue, and not to mention the pericardial fluid can become life-threatening at any time.