This is a long post, but it’s a positive one and is meant to be humorous, in an Eagle kind of way. I’ve become somewhat non-verbal and reclusive as I grow older with the myriad symptoms, so if I ever meet any of you, please remember that I’m much less prosaic in person.
As I am very new to this group, I've been reading through past posts here and can readily see that we are all sufferers and, for sure, sometimes one or two of the varied symptoms take center stage while at other times it's everything at once in a grand, off-key chorus of symptomatic nonsense. The most insidious of them, at least for me, is that of episodic insomnia, waking up at 2 or 3 in the morning a few days in a row and feeling like giving up. Of course, these dark, early morning hours are not the best times for making plans. Losing a sense of humor is another potential killer of my spirit.
One really big thing I struggle with is the inability to tolerate noise in public places, especially in crowded restaurants where music with vocals is (needlessly) played, most often too loudly. So, I have a tendency to dread social functions. When sound becomes a dizzying cacophonous mess of noise, I get up and walk out. But, it IS good to force myself to be in these situations because sometimes bizarre things can happen, thereby bringing forth a few needed laughs. The hard part is kicking myself out the door and getting into the car.
Sometimes I make notes about tough times and then try to throw some humor into it. It does help to take my mind off things.
Eight or so years ago, long before I'd become aware of Eagle Syndrome (the first I'd heard of it was with Dr Mehta's diagnosis last September, 2025), I went in for a comprehensive nerve study, partly because of lower back pain and also to see if light could be shed upon nagging symptoms that I now know are, most likely, caused by the vascular (plus Vagus and other nerve signal disruption) variety of Eagle Syndrome.
The following paragraphs are the result of writing about my experiences after being prescribed a Super-Pack of Prednisone, as per a neurologist’s orders. It wasn’t his fault. I was willing to try anything at that point.
Here ya go…have fun reading…
7/28/2019
Title: Prednisone, Camp Verde, Sylvia’s Mother, Some Beer and a Bunch of Bats.
Ever been on a Prednisone 6-day super-dose? I'm in the middle of one, prescribed by a neurologist to relax muscles and ligaments that protect the lumbar vertebrae and associated nerve roots, as sort of a test to see if it helps with numbness, tingling and other assorted stuff south of the border. I was also curious to see any of the up-above nerves that feed the five senses and digestion could be tested. Tests were "inconclusive".
It's a wonder drug, prednisone, but it can make one feel dazed, confused, ornery and sorta hungry, all at the same time. All true.
So, feeling all four side effects pret-ty heavily, I told my wife, Sarah to put me in the car and to drive me somewhere, wherever she wanted, and I didn't wanna know where we were going. "Just drive....dammit".
As the prednisone amplified things, it seemed like the roads were full of reckless road-raged motorists (they really weren’t), I suffered and struggled, but endured the trip.
Sarah drove us about 30 miles north by northwest from our home in Boerne, Texas to an historic site known as Camp Verde, a day-trip destination for many people who live near to San Antonio.
Camp Verde was originally Fort Camp Verde wherein, in the 1850s, camels were imported to hot,south Texas by the US government from Egypt as an experiment to determine if they could be used for long distance military supply transport. The camels didn’t like Texas.
You can find more on this at the Camp Verde website, plus photos of the place as it is now....a limestoned, gift-shoppey "general store" with stinky candles and other useless home accessories, a defunct post office and.....a......noisy....restaurant.
Camels can be seen everywhere on the grounds and inside the buildings. Not real camels, but photos and paintings of camels, metal junk-a-saurus camels, little one-inch rubber camels too flimsy to stand erect, wooden camels and, why, I even saw a chocolate camel riding atop a huge ice cream sundae as it was swung by my head by a frantic waitress.
The restaurant food was pretty good, maybe. I ate it. Sarah had the meatloaf...(!?)...and I had a specially made roast beef/ham sandwich on sourdough, with sweet potato "nuggets" and a good old Mexican Coke in a tall, iced glass.
This restaurant seemed like not much more than a rural Texas version of a cafeteria you will find at a place like, say, Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry. There were too many tables crammed into a 50'x50' area. The floor was concrete painted the color of terra cotta red and the oaken chairs had no felt coasters where their pointy legs met the flooring, so any time anyone pulled a chair out, pulled it in, scrunched it closer to the table, or even so much as wriggled around in it just a little bit, the horrible sound of raw wood on concrete blared like dozens of trumpeting elephants, guesting in the brass section of a kindergarten orchestra, blowing sour notes during a pre-concert tune-up. ‘76 trom-chairs led the big parade! 110 chair-nets right behind.’.
To add to the screeching wood-meets-concrete din, piped-in overly loud music featured hits (rearrange those last four letters, please) from the early 1970s. Why do restaurants insist on playing loud canned music with vocals? To add MORE voices to those of the chattering patrons, of course.
Well, the prednisone was really doing its deadly work by this time so, to minimize the aural assault, I took out my hearing aids. All that did was take off the knife's edge a bit; by this time, the noise, coupled with the loud, impatient teakettles of tinnitus had completely seeped into my spinal fluid.
We were nearly finished with lunch when that really bad song, Sylvia's Mother by Dr Hook and the Medicine Show came a-wailin' and a-cryin' over the speakers. Have you heard that one? Yes? Imagine hearing it as accompaniment to umpteen, screeching, scraping chairs, a hundred different customer voices, a broken plate or two and my old fiend tinnitus. No? If don't know that one, you're lucky.
I had a quick picture take form in my mind to request the manager to come over so I could wrestle her to the floor, pin her down right next to our table and force her to listen for an hour but, luckily for her, the bill came just as Sylvia's Mother faded, so I didn't get the chance.
We paid and left as another "lite-rock gem", Anticipation by Carly Simon started with it's dead strumming and grating vocals. Carly Simon could never really sing, but maybe she was right; These ARE the good old days...Well.....aren't they?
We left laughing. Was it the Prednisone? It sure helped.
It's a couple days later, and I'm done with the Prednisone Stupor-Pack, but am now even more spacey than normal. So we drive again, this time north to Fredericksburg, also known to locals as FritzTown, for a good German…wait, no….it was a Mexican lunch at jam-packed Mamacita's, a fine place where you can order something called the Hagi burger, named after the guy who "started it all". I couldn’t figure out how to pronounce Hagi, so I ordered something else.
Mamacita's is a good and finely-tuned machine of a restaurant, where you can see a frantic guy making tortillas with a funny looking bolted-to-the-floor machine, like a tiny version of a large gold-mining operation’s wash-plant. It spits out freshly made flour tortillas onto a jittery conveyer belt, where they happily bounce along to loud tejano music and are grabbed by the waitstaff and hurried over to hungry patrons. Sometimes, noise and oddball visuals can meld together to cause utter speechlessness and hitting-head-on-the-table exhaustion. Such was the good lunch at Mamacita's.
Finally done with that surreal sideshow, we left and drove Luckenbach-Cain Road to Old San Antonio Road and stopped for a beer at Alamo Springs Cafe, just up a hill from Old Tunnel State Park, where thousands of bats leave nightly from the tunnel to feed on doomed, flying insects.
We parked and walked into the beer garden where a band just happened to be playing The Fugitive by Merle Haggard. I hadn't heard the song since it was in the WJJD (Chicago) top 40 rotation (1968?), but I mouthed along, under my breath: 'I'd like to settle down, but they won't let me. A fugitive must be a rollin' stone..' (What does that say about how music can stick in the mind of a twelve year-old kid?)
It was way too noisy in the dining area, so we each ordered a beer and sat out on the veranda opposite the small stage. The band played Goodtime Charlie's Got the Blues, Dancin' in the Moonlight and, believe it or not, Behind the Wheel by Depeche Mode (Dëpëchë Mödë?). A little bit o' everythin' for the folks, I guess.
Well, that last song was fitting for a crashing downswing off a Prednisone binge. Imagine a Texan trying to pull off an English accent, as he sang:
“Oh, little girl, drive anywhere, do what you want, I don’t care. Tonight I’m in the hands of fate, I hand myself over on a plate. Drive…I’m yours to keep, Tonight I’m going cheap. You’re behind the wheel.”
Pretty sure those lyrics have gar nichts (German for “nothing at all”) to do with driving, but, hey.
We'd been to Old Tunnel State Park nearly a year ago and had sat (sitten?) in a miniature, bleacher bench set-up, located up, up and away from the old railway tunnel entrance. Here in the bleachers we listened to a park volunteer fervently talk about bats' habits. He was almost foaming at the mouth and yelling. At least that's what I heard. That night the weather was creepily misty so the bats were very hard to see. In fact, I saw nary a one. They must've snuck out through the back door.
This evening, however, while enduring the band at Alamo Springs Cafe, we saw wave upon wave of bats take wing into the purpled twilight sky. I ask you, who wants dry bleacher seats when you have a wet beer garden instead?
This area of Texas between Boerne, Sisterdale, Luckenbach, Comfort and Fredericksburg is a mysterious, backwoods visual treat, with many twisting, tree-lined roads that demand a steady hand on the wheel, especially after dark. If you've had even just half of one too many and are not careful, the gnarled tree limbs may just point you right off the road and down into a dry creek bed where you might not ever be found, at least not by anything human.
as I have had similar issues w/ prednisone side effects. Thankfully after my last ES surgery w/ Dr. Hepworth, when I asked for a dose of post op steroids, & told him I get bad side effects from prednisone, he Rxed dexamethasone. I’m SOLD! No more pred for me!! The only similar side effect dex caused was inability to sleep more than a few hours, but even that was less severe than when I take prednisone.