Deliberately stressing me out is, at this point, assault.

That’s how I see it anyway.  I don’t mean disagreeing with me.  Anyone who wants to disagree with me can disagree with me as much as they want to.  I’m talking about personal attacks, and you people know who you are by now.

I have severe adrenal insufficiency.  For those who don’t know what that means, it means that my body is not making cortisol.  I have to replace all of my cortisol with a steroid called dexamethasone, and I will be on dexamethasone for the rest of my life.

Cortisol is one of the hormones that is called a stress hormone, meaning it gets used when you are under physical or emotional stress.  This means that people with adrenal insufficiency have to be extremely careful when our bodies or emotions are under extra stress.

For instance, I recently had aspiration pneumonia requiring antibiotics.  This means I had to triple my dose of dexamethasone to avoid what’s called an adrenal crisis (click through to Wikipedia if you want the details).  Adrenal crisis is how people with adrenal insufficiency tend to die.

It’s not just physical stress that can cause an adrenal crisis, however.  It’s also emotional stress.  Wikipedia’s commentary on prevention of adrenal crisis is, I quote:

Adrenal crisis is triggered by stress and hence people with adrenal insufficiency need to avoid stressful situations.

That’s very important for managing adrenal insufficiency.

I recently found out that my father is dying of cancer.  We don’t know how long he has.  It has metastasized into several organs to the point where they haven’t been able to trace it back to wherever it originated.

My mother, his only caretaker, has a more severe form of a neuromuscular junction disorder (probably myasthenia gravis) that I also have.  She has to not only take care of him, but do all the jobs around the house that he used to do.  Before all this started, she had a myasthenia crisis and almost died in the ICU when she stopped breathing earlier this year.  Doctors have warned her that she’s not able to handle this and that she needs to move closer to a hospital.

My parents recently had to temporarily evacuate their home due to a forest fire that went right past it.

My grandmother has been slowing down and in poor health, but in a vague enough way they don’t really know what’s going on.  She says she’s willing to take antibiotics, but draws the line at invasive treatments like surgery, if they figure out what’s going on.  She says she’s led a good long life and she’s at peace with death.

I am under more stress right now than I have ever been in my life.  I have to consistently take a higher dose of dexamethasone than normal, just to be able to minimally function.  My endocrinologist says I’m doing the exact right thing.  But taking the extra dexamethasone doesn’t magically make the stress or its effects and dangers disappear, it just makes you safer.

I reserve the right to delete whatever posts I want for whatever reasons I want.

I reserve the right not to explain to you why I’m deleting your posts.

I reserve the right not to owe any of you an explanation for anything I do on this blog, or in my life in general.

And if you come here deliberately trying to antagonize me — and you know who you are, because you’ve been doing it for years — I will treat it the same as if you walked up and tried to start a fistfight.  Because right now, more than ever, any stress can have a catastrophic effect on my health.  Adrenal insufficiency is the worst disease to combine with stress, and myasthenia gravis doesn’t help either, especially now that I’m going on Cellcept (an immune-suppressing drug).  And don’t try to tell me these diseases aren’t real, my doctors who in both cases did the labwork personally, will laugh in your face. And to be abundantly clear it’s adrenal insufficiency (i.e. they could not find cortisol in my blood at all), not adrenal fatigue (i.e. a condition used by quacks to blame literally any symptom on, regardless of your actual hormone levels, which then puts you in danger because you’re not getting treatment for whatever the real disease is).

So if you disagree with me, disagree with me.

But if you’re here to antagonize, to bully, to start fights, with a chip on your shoulder, to threaten me, to accuse me of not really being disabled, to deliberately trigger my PTSD, and all the other things that stalkers and trolls like to do for fun?  Fuck off back where you came from and never bother me again.  And understand that if I actually enter an adrenal crisis because of stress you caused, then you are partially responsible for what happened.  I guarantee you the adrenal insufficiency is 100% the real deal, no matter what you think.  And people who know me will view you as responsible.  If you have enough of a conscience to care about things like that, then think about it before you pick fights with me for fun.  I have enough going on right now without that.  Have some basic human decency for once.