Today I’m going to take a little break from writing about pop culture to get a little personal.

Ten years ago today, I was officially diagnosed as having Myasthenia Gravis. I’d been silently suffering with it for at least eleven years prior to the diagnosis.  I wrote about it at the time HERE. Ten years on, Myasthenia Gravis has become a recurring character in this blog, more like the wacky neighbor in a sitcom than a chronic auto-immune disorder. I imagine some of my readers start rolling their eyes every time they see “Myasthenia” in a post.

In the decade since my diagnosis, the disease hasn’t much changed. I still have good days and bad days, but my bad days are generally better than my best days were before I began treatment. I still have trouble operating a touch-screen, which is why I rarely text. I am fortunate that I have a very mild case of MG, but one of the trade-offs is that I don’t seem to be anywhere close to being in remission.

And I’m okay with that.

For the first year-and-a-half I was treated with Prednisone, which I hated. I have since switched to a much better medicine and it looks like I’m not having any bad side effects from that.

I am actually in pretty good health for someone my age. Aside from the MG, I don’t have any major problems. My cholesterol is 133. I’m getting closer to a healthy weight. My blood pressure is fine. Following cataract surgery several years ago, my eyesight has improved to 20/20, but I still wear glasses to correct some lingering double-vision from MG. All-in-all, things are swell.

I have had some major life-changes. I used to go out four or five nights a week to record bands for the Radio Free Charleston video show. I can’t do that anymore. The meds that I take usually make me too drowsy to function after 10 PM.

When I do have the energy to get out and do things, I’m really enjoying travelling with my wonderful wife, Mel Larch. We have been together for 36 years, but for more than the first two-thirds of that time I was tied up with caregiver duties and simply could not travel.

Mel and Rudy at The ROQ

For the last ten years or so, we’ve been making up for lost time. Now we regularly go to Chicago, New York, Lexington, Louisville and other favorite cities. When possible, I try to share those trips with my readers with photo essays or video.

I mean, we’re planning a trip to the new Buc-ee’s in Dayton in a few weeks. It’s the type of worldly, sophisticated content that PopCult readers have come to expect.

I haven’t completely forsaken the local scene. In recent weeks I’ve made it out to The West Virginia Punk Rock Flea Market in Huntington, Ann Magnuson’s closing night talk at the Warhol exhibit at the Clay Center and just last Saturday, an incredible show by Lady D at The Roq, below the Quarrier Diner.

I’m hoping to do more stuff like that, now that things are normalizing a bit and some local music events are starting at earlier times.

I really want to go see Factory Reset, the resident Improv troupe for The Alban Arts Center, but they have an uncanny knack for scheduling shows when we’re out of town.

Bringing this back to how MG has affected PopCult (aside from being my go-to excuse when I’m not happy with a piece I do for Monday Morning Art), It hasn’t really done too much besides making it easier to decide to take RFC back to being mostly a radio show.

In the coming weeks in this blog you can expect more comics, books and toy reviews. We’ll still be providing new content on our sister internet radio station, The AIR. Radio Free Charleston will continue as a radio show, but…for the first time since 2015, we are planning to do more than one episode of the video version of the show this year.

And if we pull off all of the trips we have planned, you can at least expect photo essays of the new Buc-ee’s, a massive toy store, a wild grocery store/amusement park, The Warhol Museum, a really cool video store, The Marx Toy Show, The Kentuckiana GI Joe Toy Expo, The KrugerFest Action Figure Show, The Hershey Action Figure and Toy Show, plus a Christkindl Market or two.

Basically, ten years into officially having MG, not much has changed. I’m still PopCulting. I’m not planning on that changing any time soon. It doesn’t really seem to have anything to do with MG, but last year readership of PopCult more than doubled over 2024, and the first three months of this year have already exceeded the readership for all of  2025. We’ve actually more than tripled our annual readership since we left The Charleston Gazette-Mail.  And I’m not even trying to promote it that hard.

I dont think all of that can be attributed to AI bots scraping this blog for content. There have to be some new readers out there…right?

Thanks for reading…even you AI bots.

While on Prednisone, I constantly imagined that I was being followed by giant food.