Tag: life and death
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Moving Forward in My Encephalitis and New Directions
Shawn P. B. Robinson
January 2024 Jumping ahead to 2024 gives me a good chance to reflect. It’s been seven years since I had encephalitis. I still deal with overwhelming exhaustion. Some days I nap a lot… some days I nap less… I always have to be careful not to overdo it, or I’ll end up crashing for a…
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January 2020 in My Encephalitis and New Directions
Shawn P. B. Robinson
January 2020 Two years passed by, relatively quickly, in a sense. Some major things happened along the way. I ended up learning a great deal about how to pace myself in order to level out my energy levels. I spent some time down in Bethesda, Maryland, being a bit of a guinea pig for a…
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January 2018 in My Encephalitis and New Directions
Shawn P. B. Robinson
January 2018 At work, I did what I could. But, as the weeks and months passed by, what I could do was less and less all the time. As my wife researched the matter, she found a paper by the National Institute of Health in the US that pointed out this was common with post-encephalitis…
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Day Fifteen and Beyond of My Encephalitis and New Directions
Shawn P. B. Robinson
Friday, February 10, 2017 and the following months In the weeks that followed, I found my life had changed. Significantly. I dealt with headaches all the time—something I rarely struggled with before. Or truthfully… a single headache that never left and only varied in intensity. I was suddenly weak. Sure, some of the muscle…
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Day Fourteen of Encephalitis and New Directions
Shawn P. B. Robinson
Thursday, February 9, 2017 I awoke with my normal pain in my head, my itchy forehead, an uncomfortable eye, but no fear of belly needles. It was already shaping up to be a good day. I had nurses scheduled to come to my home each day. Their job was to make sure…
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Day Thirteen of Encephalitis and New Directions
Shawn P. B. Robinson
Wednesday, February 8, 2017 The day finally came. They relaxed their guard and decided the world would be safe once again with my presence among the general population. I was no longer a threat to public safety, and they no longer needed to protect the world from me. I just had to…
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Day Eleven of Encephalitis and New Directions
Shawn P. B. Robinson
Monday, February 6, 2017 On Monday, I woke up to the familiar sound of a nurse walking into my room, giggling with glee at what she was about to do to my belly. Some nurses could do it with less pain than others, but I think they were just the less experienced ones. The…
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Day Ten of Encephalitis and New Directions
Shawn P. B. Robinson
Sunday, February 5, 2017 On Sunday, I continued to write. If you’ve read my Arestana series, you know it’s pretty odd and silly. Since I hadn’t planned on publishing it, I didn’t hold back. I knew what made my sons laugh, and I jumped in with both feet. I had a lot of…
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Day Nine of Encephalitis and New Directions
Shawn P. B. Robinson
Saturday, February 4, 2017 On Saturday, they placed me in an isolation room in the hospital. An isolation room is a strange thing. As you sit in your bed with the negative air pressure, you realize that by placing you in that room, they are declaring you to be dangerous to the…
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Day Eight of Encephalitis and New Directions
Shawn P. B. Robinson
Friday, February 3, 2017 Lumbar Puncture… I almost didn’t go. The doctor who declared two days before that I’d had a seizure also decided that I should go to the Urgent Care Neurological Centre (UCNC) in London (not London, UK… London, ON). Since I didn’t want to believe that I’d had a…