A Certain Flare, Not Flair, Not Fair

My legs and arms have felt like tuning forks lately. It's worse when I lay down, but it's a constant feeling of vibrating/tingling/hurting. I think that's what has been preventing me from sleeping; sometimes I feel like I'm going to vibrate right out of bed, like in the old cartoons.

My eyes have been wonky lately. I'll look, and I'll see, but I'll only see a portion of what's in front of me.

Pain. I've had more pain than I usually deal with on a daily basis.

In short, I'm having an exacerbation.

I've had the great debate with myself for days whether to mention this development, lest I seem like I'm whining. I ultimately decided to write about it because a) I think you know me well enough to know that I'm not usually a whiner and b) when I started this blog, I said I was going to write about the good and bad.

As you all know, I started the Tecfidera right around the New Year. I thought I had read all about it, but I found a new patient forum where people reported an increase of exacerbations after starting Tecfidera. MS is a cunning thing; am I having a flare up from the Tecfidera, or would my flare up be worse if I wasn't taking the Tecfidera? Those are questions that can't be answered with any certainty.

I know my MS, usually, and after a particularly stressful time, I expect to have a flare. That's just how mine works. As you know, my mother passed away a couple of weeks before Christmas, so is this my stress flare? If so, it's unusually delayed. The stress flares I experienced have always been almost immediately after the stress stopped. It's as though the excess adrenaline my body produces keeps the disease in check somewhat.

So, there you have it, and now you know why I haven't really posted. I had a story clogging the pipeline, and nothing else could get through.