proud recipient of a pair of warm, moist tysabris

I am now the proud recipient of two Tysabri infusions. Why does it make you this way, like a little sleep puppet, retching and writhing around? At least I feel connected to the renaissance this way, when people were constantly poisoning each other and turning each other into sleep puppets, things that retched and writhed and then eventually died and were hauled away on overloaded carts. I mean, nothing.

There's something somewhat wrong with my liver now, because if it's not one thing, let's go ahead and make it another. I should know lots about livers and their discontents: I wrote a story about a liver transplant (and read from it, with extremely borderline success, Saturday night in front of like one hundred plus people). While I was writing it, I read for weeks about livers and the things that happened to them. I enjoy doing this while I am writing: the research. I openly admit that approximately zero percent of said research appears in the stories themselves; I just like reading about new things. Mostly when I research I am checking to see if my idea is completely implausible, or just mostly implausible. It's the mostly implausible that I'm aiming for.

I got taken off of my pain medications and put on new ones so that my liver wouldn't be as taxed. I'd be sad about this except my old pain medications weren't working, and neither, perhaps just for some thematic continuity, are the new ones. I'm taking them for abdominal pain and also the most intense, shark-began-gnawing-on-it leg pain you could ever imagine. Apparently that's steroid withdrawal. Because if it's not one thing, you know, it's another.

My major coup of the week concerns my Thursday-morning MRI, which my neurologist (update: I don't have PML yet) says I can have without contrast! Which means no IV! Which means no chance of them fucking up my arm like last time. I literally said, "Woohoo!" and was met with a look that suggested I seriously needed to get out more. I had an IV yesterday for my Tysabri, anyway, and that pleasant experience didn't exactly make me eager to get another one on Thursday. (Although the nurse did compliment me several times on how "tiny, almost impossibly tiny!" my veins were while she was nosing around trying to get a hit. That's a compliment, right?)

Recently the doctors have all been asking me if I live alone, if I have anyone who can take care of me. (Juan is in town again right now, which is very nice.)
"Why?" I ask, after answering.
They are looking at me in an unfamiliar way I don't like, like I am smaller than I am, or something bad is about to happen to me that I'm not aware of.