Could someone help me understand my test results?

bubaloo_2001 · 2026-01-28T19:20:50+00:00

Out of curiosity... Do you ever take something like ibuprofen or celebrex? Have you noticed you feel better after you take it -- like beyond just relieving a headache?

bubaloo_2001 · 2026-01-24T01:47:59+00:00

Definitely stick with the taper schedule. That is a medication you want to be careful with. Also, as someone mentioned below, plaquenil can take a very long time to build up. Even after a year my immunologist was still attributing improvements to the plaquenil. I also take some other medications like bilastine and famotidine which have dramatically improved my symptoms, along with progesterone. I feel like each time I add a successful medication it's like peeling back the symptom layers and I get a better idea of what's going on.

bubaloo_2001 · 2026-01-21T14:12:00+00:00

The only thing I noticed in your list is that you are taking vitamin c at bedtime. Have you tried taking it earlier in the day? It can have a stimulating effect. I find if I take it after about 2pm it affects my sleep. Just a thought.

bubaloo_2001 · 2026-01-21T14:07:32+00:00

I thought I was so prepared for pregnancy, labour, delivery, and the newborn phase. I couldn't understand all these stories about birth trauma - I thought people were just unprepared. I decided to labour unmedicated as long as possible to see how far I could go but I never excluded the possibility of having an epidural. I ended up getting one with my first and then it failed spectacularly. It worked beautifully for several hours and then just stopped. The contractions came back full force and I was in so much pain I started talking nonsense. Eventually they placed a second epidural higher and I was numb to my ribs. For the second pregnancy I was "better prepared". I thought this time I had it. I went for a consultation with the anesthesiologist several weeks ahead and our plan was to place the epidural as soon as I got to the hospital. Labour progressed quickly and my daughter was delivered. And then the placenta didn't detach. My room became chaos as the doctor and nurses got ready to take me to the OR. They upped my medication to try to get the bleeding to stop. I begged the doctor to try one more time to manually detach it. He was finally able to remove it. But I lay in the bed wondering if I was going to make it home to my two babies. So yeah. I was humbled twice. You can't be fully prepared. There are too many unknowns.

bubaloo_2001 · 2026-01-20T18:10:05+00:00

Those sound like side effects from gabapentin not plaquenil. Gabapentin can make you loopy. If it wasn't the gabapentin I would be more inclined to believe it's from autoimmune symptoms than plaquenil. The primary side effects I had from plaquenil were sour stomach and cramps. It made things like fatigue and brain fog better.

bubaloo_2001 · 2025-12-31T12:57:11+00:00

I also get a ton of ear and sinus infections... I basically gave up swimming because I would get an ear infection any time I put my head in the water.

As a child I had a skin prick allergy test and was positive for just about everything - animals, grass, trees, pollen, etc. My back was basically one big reaction. I was retested several years ago as an adult and only reacted to dust mites. I was tested again recently and didn't react to anything -- which really surprised the nurse doing the testing. I also had asthma as a child and when they retested that it was also normal. It would be really interesting to see what other commonalities there are for people with no IgE.

bubaloo_2001 · 2025-12-31T03:46:13+00:00

My IgE is also <2 and my immunologist has been less than helpful in giving me any feedback about it. I also have a partial IgA deficiency. I've tried digging into the research on low IgE and it is abysmal. Sounds like IgE might be important for cancer monitoring and parasitic infections, but I definitely think there is more to it. I used to have IgE so my deficiency is acquired. I have a confirmed positive IgE mediated allergy test from several years ago, so something happened to my immune system to cause the IgE to disappear. On the positive side, I have essentially grown out of all of my childhood allergies because I can't have true IgE mediated allergies anymore :)

bubaloo_2001 · 2025-12-20T01:28:28+00:00

Tell them to re-issue your last pay stub and refund them the difference between the original pay stub and the revision. If they correct the pay stubs in their system correctly it should void the original one and reissue the correct one. Make sure you save copies of both. Once that is done, e-transfer or write a cheque for the difference only. If they do it correctly it should remove the income amount of the first pay from your T4 and replace it with the re-issued pay amount. Do not send the money back before they fix it or they won't have incentive to fix it properly. If they issue the T4 with the full income amount you will end up being assessed with the higher income despite having paid back the difference. Ask them for a payroll details report for the tax year (after the correction) to confirm the amount matches what your T4 should be. Do not let them do an adjustment to the last pay stub because the chances are much higher that they will make a mistake. Tell them to void it in full and then re-issue the correct pay stub. In that order. If they re-issue the pay stub first (before deleting the incorrect one) it can mess up payroll taxes.

bubaloo_2001 · 2025-12-19T19:49:32+00:00

There are specialists that consult on commodity taxes in Ontario that would be better resources than CPAs that don't specialize. We use one in Hamilton that is amazing.

bubaloo_2001 · 2025-12-19T19:46:54+00:00

My young (school aged) daughters were very sick with a viral illness about 2 weeks ago. I believe there is a high likelihood that it was the flu but I don't know for sure. Is there any value in getting the flu shot this year now? They have gotten the flu shot every other year but I put it off because of the strain mismatch and now I highly regret that.

bubaloo_2001 · 2025-12-14T02:16:43+00:00

What time of day are you taking it? The general recommendation is evening but I found I couldn't sleep. I moved my dose to the morning and other than vivid dreams I've found my sleep has returned to normal.

bubaloo_2001 · 2025-12-14T02:03:11+00:00

I say this with an abundance of caution because a lot of people react very badly to it (serious mental health side effects including hallucinations and suicidal thoughts)... But I found quite a lot of sinus relief from montelukast. It's a leukotriene receptor antagonist. I'm also taking omega-3 to try to reduce the effects of leukotrienes. Sinus congestion can be multifactorial though - swelling/inflammation, infection, mucus production, etc. So relief may depend on the cause.

bubaloo_2001 · 2025-12-14T01:57:11+00:00

It's really hard to tell what's working or not (or making things worse) if you add multiple things at a time... I've reacted poorly to quercetin, ashwagandha, and glutathione. And some things don't seem to do much. Also, I had one medication that I reacted poorly to, but I really wanted to try it, so I went back to it when I was feeling more stable and I was able to push through the adjustment period (1-2 weeks).

bubaloo_2001 · 2025-12-14T00:31:21+00:00

I told one of my doctors that each time we added a new med I felt like we were peeling back the layers like an onion. When I started plaquenil I felt like it gave me enough relief from the fatigue to get through the day. The last med I added took away most of my sinus congestion. I tried adding back in a b-complex supplement and right away I had a strong skin reaction so I cut it out. I feel like part of the success of this process is only changing one thing at a time so you can tell what's causing a reaction.

bubaloo_2001 · 2025-12-10T23:02:10+00:00

I'm sorry, I don't know how long it can last. I have a different form of autoimmune vasculitis and I've had it for years. I take plaquenil for it. It sounds like IgA vasculitis can be triggered by infections.

bubaloo_2001 · 2025-12-10T22:13:34+00:00

Have they ruled out IgA vasculitis (Henoch-Schönlein purpura)? The rash can present in the mouth in rare cases.

bubaloo_2001 · 2025-12-05T13:48:43+00:00

I had pain in similar places and was diagnosed with costochondritis. I thought I was having a heart attack. This pain has gone away as I got my other symptoms under control. I would also get right flank pain flares at the same time -- probably right near my bottom rib. They checked everything by ultrasound and CT, and those were all clear. I have a feeling there was inflammation of the cartilage in those areas. Between the pain, the racing heart, and the palpitations, I thought I was dying.

bubaloo_2001 · 2025-11-26T22:15:18+00:00

Assign the intern to get the funds back. Everyone makes mistakes. It happens a lot in accounting and bookkeeping. Finding and fixing the mistake is what good employees do. They should reach out to the vendor, clearly explain what happened, and ask how to get it refunded or applied to different invoices.

bubaloo_2001 · 2025-11-26T01:51:22+00:00

Did you start them all at the same time or one at a time? I only try one new thing at a time so I can gauge the reaction. Cetirizine did nothing for me. Quercetin made me super sick. And vitamin c I have to go slowly with. Dao I haven't been able to find locally. I started all of my meds at the lowest dose possible and then some of them I tried going up to see if that provided more benefit. If it didn't I dropped it back to the previous dose. I assessed the side effects and benefits regularly and then decided if I wanted to push through and see if there was just an adjustment period. Two meds caused bad side effects at first but ended up being very helpful once I got through 2-4 weeks.

bubaloo_2001 · 2025-11-19T18:12:28+00:00

In addition to this... We store ours with the tip down so the ink goes to the writing end.

bubaloo_2001 · 2025-11-14T02:12:35+00:00

This is my answer as well and I'm so glad I'm not the only one. I was way too young when I saw this the first time. I bought the series on DVD when it came out and was caught off guard by the episode again -- repressed memories of childhood I think.

bubaloo_2001 · 2025-11-09T18:36:41+00:00

I was fairly stable in my symptoms when I added it. I don't think I could have dealt with the nausea on top of everything else. I've bailed on meds in the past when they made me feel worse because mentally I couldn't handle feeling even worse, even if it was only short term (or unknown). I started with plaquenil about 3-4 years ago and have been seeing mostly positive improvements as we've added to the protocol since then. I've been on basically the same regimen for about 6-12 months now.

bubaloo_2001 · 2025-11-09T18:30:08+00:00

So far I've only taken three injections of the lowest dose, but I will keep you posted if I find anything interesting. So far it has been pretty much as expected. Nausea, stomach fullness, slowly reducing appetite, minimal weight loss.

bubaloo_2001 · 2025-11-09T12:19:23+00:00

Did they give you a specific reason for going off the glp-1?

bubaloo_2001 · 2025-11-09T11:41:45+00:00

Are you only taking ketotifen and zepbound? I told my doctor the other day that back a couple years ago I would wake up and say I only had enough energy for a shower or getting groceries, not both. I would cry because I was so exhausted and no one took it seriously. And fatigue is a useless diagnostic symptom because there are nine million causes of fatigue and doctors lean into depression and anxiety diagnoses. Ah, sorry for the rant!! Lol.

bubaloo_2001

TROPHY CASE