Nine years ago this week, I was diagnosed with Myasthenia Gravis.

Hardly a week goes by in PopCult where I don’t mention it, but I haven’t given a full-blown update in quite some time. About a week after I was diagnosed, I wrote a long post about it here,  but it’s been a while since I’ve gone into detail about how it’s changed my life.

For our new readers who “TLDR” the original post, Myasthenia Gravis is an auto-immune disorder where your body attacks the membranes that transmit signals from your nerves to your muscles. I was diagnosed as having it in April, 2016, but I had been having major symptoms of it for at least eleven years prior…since before I even started writing this blog. I was cool with the diagnosis. I’d feared it was something worse.

I am very fortunate in that I have an extremely mild case. It only affects my fingers and eyes. I have had friends and met other people who had it way worse. They could not walk, swallow or even hold their neck up. I am very lucky.

The trade-off of having a mild case is that, since going on the medication, it’s pretty much been the same. I sporadically show signs of a near-remission, but for probably 80% of the time I’m at a very tolerable baseline.

Prior to treatment, a “bad day” meant that I couldn’t open a water bottle or operate the shift on my car. Buttoning buttons was a chore, and producing physical works of art was simply not even something I could consider. On a good day I had trouble holding a pencil or brush.

Now, most of the time I’m fine. During a “flare-up,” my worst days are better than my best days before I began my treatment. I’m painting and drawing again, and have found that years of painting digitally have actually made me a better artist. I’m still mainly doing smaller studies instead of full-blown canvases, but that’s more due to my limited time than to my limited ability.  I do still have trouble with touchscreens, which is why I don’t text, much to the consternation of almost everybody who knows me. If you send me a text, I’m not going to see it until the one or two times a year I have to check my messages for two-step verification.

I am much less of a social animal since my diagnosis. Much of that is due to the medication I take, which makes me sleep like a normal human for the first time in my life. I don’t get out nearly as much as I used to, but I have to admit that some of that is my age (I’m old), and the realization that I want to spend as much time as possible with my beautiful wife, Mel, as much as it’s due to the limitations of MG and the related medications I take to control it.

Since Charleston has always been a very late-starting city in terms of our musical venues, I just can’t make it out four or five nights a week like I used to back in the heyday of the Radio Free Charleston video show. When you start dozing off by 10 PM, and most bands don’t start playing until 11:30, it gets a bit tricky. I’m lucky to crank out one video show a year now.

But, I’ve refocused on the RFC radio show, which I still have a blast doing. It’s way less work. I can produce a three-hour radio show in an afternoon, whereas a twenty-minute video show takes hundreds of hours of shooting, editing, rendering and all the other stuff I need to do behind the scenes.

Monday Morning Art features way more physical art than it did when I began posting my art in the early days of this blog.

The reason for this post is, a lot of friends have been asking about it lately. I feel pretty great most of the time, except for having 62-year-old knees. I’m dropping weight. Melanie and I are travelling more. I’m still doing what I can to “Support The Local Scene” via PopCult‘s internet radio station, The AIR and our weekly STUFF TO DO post.

Tomorrow I’m going to write about a fun little diversion that’s probably coming to an end soon, and then PopCult will soldier on, bringing you my take on pop culture, plus local news and music, and whatever TV, Movies, Toys, Comics, Food and anything else I feel like writing about in this space.  Once in a while, I’ll talk about something personal, like today.