The Prednisone Diaries

Me, the entire time I was on this drug. Only I didn't have the fat.

Prednisone is a steroid. You may be familiar with it if you have asthma, allergies, ear infections, etc., but I guarantee you've only had the smaller daily dose packs. I had five days of 100mg through IV, and then I started a 12 day oral taper - 2 60mg doses, 2 50mg doses, 2 40mg, etc. It effectively cleared the swelling and fluid on my optic nerve, and the near total blindness in my right eye is slowly, slowly improving. I can now see movement and count fingers, but still can't see screens/books/faces clearly or read, and there's still one spot that is totally blind in the center of my vision. Comparatively from where I was at when I was admitted to the hospital, I'm okay with this. Partial blindness has only restricted me very little, because my champ of a left eye decided to regain 20/20 vision when the right went out. I just can't do stairs, my depth perception is screwed, and I can't drive. My neuro-opthamologist is confident, however, that I can regain 80-90% of my normal vision, with a chance of a possible complete recovery. It just takes time, as once the nerve begins to heal, vision itself is delayed by a week or so. Something something eyeball magic.

My IV injections of the prednisone never really caused any immediate horrible side effects that I noticed, or maybe the steroids just had to build up in my body first. Sleep was the first big disruption. When I could get it, I would wake up within hours of falling asleep wide awake, and sometimes panicked. Then came the hot flashes. Now this is a typical woman thing later in life, but I can honestly say at 26 I'd never experienced this before so I really didn't understand what was happening. I just thought the temperature in my hospital room fluctuated a lot. Then my blood pressure began to climb to pretty high levels. When I went home I was on the third day of my oral taper; my doc prescribed a very small dose of a diuretic to help keep it under control, and wrote a referral to a nephrologist to see if we couldn't investigate the cause (I've always had readings that some docs and nurses consider "a little high" when it came to BP). That night I slept rough again, but when I woke up the next morning I felt fine. I felt great. I wanted to try and get out of the house a little, after being cooped up in the hospital and mostly in bed for over a week. And then I took that day's dose of prednisone and my other medications.

Day 4 of the oral taper is when it began hitting me, full tilt. Hard. Things went rapidly downhill after I took my medication that morning, and after that every day on the steroids was a total challenge. I battled nausea and other stomach pain, which made eating difficult. I made it three full days at home before returning to the ER on the fourth, tachycardic, panicked, and with a high blood pressure that was not being managed. The steroids had increased my anxiety - it felt like I'd consumed about 10 cups of coffee, all the time - and I'd begun having panic attacks in my sleep, which would wake me up in a panic, and the vicious cycle never stopped. The ER doctor gave me an IV dose of Valium and sent me home with a low dose of a beta blocker to help the anxiety. While this cured my physical symptoms, it did nothing for the root cause, and by Sunday I was calling my regular doctor to go back in for another medication readjustment. From then on, the new medication and the decreasing doses helped the severity of the side effects, but I can safely say I do not enjoy steroids and I was never happier than the day I took my last dose. In fact, we went out for dinner that night to Koi. I had a waygu steak and it was glorious (my stomach didn't like it so much the next day, but I was sort of okay with the trade off).

Now that I've been off of the steroids for a glorious six days, my BP is finally coming back under control and I've come off of most of the medication I was on to keep it managed. I haven't had anymore tachycardic episodes either, and my hot flashes are gone. My sleep patterns are finally starting to return to semi-normal, in that I can at least sleep a solid amount, not wake up panicked, and still feel refreshed. I'm still battling a bit of daytime fatigue, though whether that's from the MS or from the massive amount of medications I've been on through this is anyone's guess. It probably also has a lot to do with not sleeping well for a good while. My anxiety is greatly improved, and if I do feel panicked, I can usually manage it before it gets out of control, but I've had less and less of those episodes daily - some days, not at all.

Another weird mental side effect of all of this was the total disconnect I suddenly felt from my own body. It was horrible feeling like I wasn't in charge of any of it, and like a totally different person. A positive side effect was that by the time I'd come off of the steroids, I'd lost 20lbs from where I was when I went into the hospital. That much weight loss that rapidly, and all of the other fun things that came along with the medicines, made me feel like a stranger in my own skin. Not to mention being diagnosed with a disease that is both unknown in cause and has no cure. I asked the doctor after being diagnosed, before I truly understood what MS was, if I had caused this in some way. He reassured me that lifestyle wasn't the cause, but that didn't help the feeling that I had, in some way, done this to myself. Then I began questioning why my body hated me so much. I've had a lot of back and forth in coming to terms with this, and I'm not sure I'm even quite there yet, but I'm better now. So much better. I feel more like myself, I feel relatively healthier, I feel more like a functional human being.

It helps that yesterday I overcame another big hurdle on my MS journey. My doctor and I had a long discussion when I was in the hospital about the various disease-modifying treatments available to help in reducing relapses. We decided that Gilenya (Fingolimod) was the right way to go. Unlike some MS treatments, it's a once daily oral pill. A lot of others are injections, or had side effects that I didn't like the idea of. Gilenya has a high success rate in dropping MS relapses by half, and from what I've been reading on it from people who take it, many have had few, if any relapses since beginning it. I'm optimistic that on it, I will be able to continue carrying on just like I did before we discovered this. The big hurdle I'm referring to is that Gilenya causes a decrease in heart rate in some people, so after taking the first dose, you have to be on a heart monitor for six hours to make sure that it doesn't drop dangerously low. I took my first dose yesterday and passed with flying colors - my heart rate never dropped below 70, and the EKG I had afterwards showed that my heart is in great condition, which means that I can now continue on my own.

So now I'm on the right track. My medications are all in order and I've got a great team of doctors behind me that I feel totally confident in. I couldn't ask for a better situation, and I'm counting my blessings that things are finally beginning to go smoothly. I'd like to take a moment here to thank everyone for the messages, good wishes, thoughts, and prayers that have been directed my way over the past couple of weeks. I can't tell you how much it all meant to me, and how much all of the funny pet videos helped me get through even the very worst of days. It kept me laughing and smiling no matter how bad I felt. You've all contributed, in no small way, in getting me here to where I am today, comfortable and healthy enough to write this blog to finally shed some light on what's been going on. I love you all.

Keeping a Promise

Sometime near the end of my hospital stay, I was taken back to the eye clinic for new scans to determine how my eye was clearing up. With optic neuritis, the swelling and fluid on the nerve will go down before vision returns, so though I'd had a very small increase in visibility, the doctor wanted to see just how effective the steroids were in treating the cause (very effective, it turns out). Transport came up to my room and fetched me, because the clinic is a long way across from the main hospital, and set me up with a wheelchair and a blanket and off we went. When we got there there was a little confusion about why I was there and who had sent me because the orders hadn't come through yet, so they put me in the waiting room while they straightened things out.

As they wheeled me in, I noticed a young, beautiful Emirati girl sitting in there behind big sunglasses. She had on a gorgeously embellished but simple abaya and shellah, and I was pretty sure her shoes were designer. She was impeccably dressed. I smiled at her and she smiled back, and then they parked my chair across from where she was sitting and left us alone. Now, I was an absolute mess after being in the hospital for a week plus, and my bad eye was frustrating me, so I kinda sat with my head in my hand to cover it, wrapped in my hospital blanket because the clinic was freezing. I wished I'd brought my phone or my tablet with me for something to do. I'm not usually one to just openly talk to some person unless they address me first, and I didn't know if the girl wanted to be left alone because it was a doctor's waiting office and you just never really know. It's kind of an awkward place to chat people up.

CNN was on the television in the waiting room, and they began running some ISIS related story. I cringed internally and half paid attention to the TV (watching TV at that point was still an exercise in frustration) and what they were saying when I heard a very quiet "This is so sad, isn't it?"

Surprised, I looked up to face the girl and realized she was talking to me. When I agreed that it was, in fact, incredibly sad, she suddenly opened up and bared her soul. "It's so sad. It has to be stopped. What they are doing, it is not right." She continued, talking about how ISIS was presenting a terrible representation of Islam to the rest of the world, and then she said, "And it affects how they see us as people. I hope they do not see all of us like that, we are not all murders, we are peaceful people."

I thought about all of the backlash and ugliness in the US against Muslims recently (this was even before the San Bernandino shooting), and I nearly wept right there in the waiting room. It broke my heart.

All I could do was assure her that there were people out there who did not see all Muslims as bad people, that there were people that understood, and that I was one of them - that I understood that Islam is a peaceful religion practiced every day by millions of people, that I have lived beside them for a year and a half and knew that they were just normal everyday people with kind and giving hearts who were trying to live their lives like everyone else - only in a manner different from ours, and with a different name for God.

The conversation switched at that point, and she introduced herself after I told her I liked her shoes (Jimmy Choos, of course). She told me all about how she'd had a nasty infection in her eye and how it had affected her sight, and I told her about losing mine. She talked about how something like that really changes your perspective on life and makes you think. She told me about her family, and how she has a little brother who she wasn't able to hold and play with because she was afraid of transferring her virus. I told her how I came to be in the hospital, and about being diagnosed with MS.

We talked for several minutes, chatting about anything and everything (she talked about Friends - she liked my name because Monica was her favorite character) before the imaging tech came to fetch me, and then we wished each other luck as we said goodbye. She was gone when I was done with my scans, and I didn't see her again.

But I held a silent, secret, unspoken promise to her close to my heart as I was wheeled back to my room in the main hospital. I would tell people about her wish and the talk we'd had. I would share my own wonderful experiences living among a Muslim population, a peaceful population, in a place where I have felt more safe at times than I have living in the US. I would work to change hearts and minds who view all Muslims as terrorists, murders, rapists, who make value judgments against an entire people because of the actions of a few radical extremists. I would no longer remain silent, as I have, hoping not to incite arguments, when they were attacked. I would become their defender.

I implore anyone who reads this to sit and think, really think, about the way you view the world and its people. All it takes is one small moment to change someone's mind, one kind person. Just as all it takes to ruin something is one awful person, one bad experience. Yet we can't simply judge an entire people on the actions of a few. It's not fair to the quiet, peaceful people who are just trying to live their lives day to day like you and I. I know the counterarguments. I know it happens on both sides. This is just as much a plea to them as it is to you, that they would reach out and give a Westerner a chance just like this girl did for me. Maybe if we all were a little humbled and sat down to talk, things would get better. We would see we're not so different after all.

Through the Looking Glass

This is a difficult post to write. I'm pretty sure all of my next few posts are going to be like this, but for some reason this one in particular is a sticking point for me. It probably won't be as detailed as the last, and I'm sure it's going to be shorter. Whether the omissions are because I can't or won't remember is beyond me, but there are definitely times, moments, days that are lost for now. I don't know if I am going to get them back, and I don't know if I want to get them back.

Backtracking a little, I'll start at the morning of the diagnosis, or my first full day in the hospital. I'd slept well, even after starting my IV drip of prednisone (the steroid to clear my eye), and woke up optimistic for the tests we were going to run. Blood was drawn and I was told I was waiting for MRI space to open up so we could run the scans. I was warned that my doctor had ordered a full battery of brain, orbital, cervical and thoracic spine scans, and that it was probably going to be an hour and a half of testing. Nervous as I'd never had an MRI before and it was a new experience, I was finally taken down to imaging in the early afternoon.

Now I know MRI and I don't get along well. I was in the machine for less than a minute before it brought on a full on panic attack and they had to pull me out and talk me down. The worst part was because the scans were of my brain, they wouldn't give me anything for the anxiety, and I had to work through it myself. Once I was calmed down and reassured by the MRI tech, she started playing my music again (in case anyone was wondering, the soundtrack to my hour and a half of scans was the Guardians of the Galaxy soundtrack and Gaga's Born This Way, mostly because it was the only thing I had downloaded on my phone and couldn't stream radio) and we began the process. She kept me updated on how long each scan would take and what it was doing, and I closed my eyes and tried to focus on the music the best I could. For me, it wasn't the noise of the MRI, but the space and the need to keep completely still. I practically tore myself off of the table when it was all done.

The rest of that night happened as I've already said, except I left out that the horribly uncomfortable positioning of the MRI had left me with a bad headache, which was being managed by pain meds but never went away.

Wednesday was a bad day, and one I don't remember well. Sometime over the course of the day the headache that refused to leave blossomed into a full migraine, and I was given IV magnesium sulfate, which finally cleared the headache up, but they neglect to tell you that mag sulfate hurts like hell when it's being administered. Like fire being pushed into my veins.

I also really don't remember Thursday and Friday. I know that I Skyped with and talked to my family, I know Jon was there, I remember all of the amazing things the nurses did for me and how kind they were, I remember talking to the doctor who told me at one point he was handing my case off to another neurologist I had asked about (I found her looking at the Cleveland Clinic page, and her profile specifically listed MS as one of those "things I can help with" blurbs). I also remember the visits from my friends Lise and Michelle, which meant so very much to me because it was wonderful to see friendly faces I knew and to have time to talk to people who weren't nurses, doctors, or staff. I probably spent a lot of that downtime I don't remember looking forward to those visits, since watching TV or reading was something I couldn't tolerate long with my eye. Lise brought me a beautiful coloring book and mechanical colored pencils which I worked on a bit, and Michelle brought me some lovely Christmas themed fuzzy socks which have been my constant companions since I've come home. There was lots of joking about the fact that the hospital garb had been done by a famous designer I actually knew (Diana von Furstenburg) and how it looked a lot like the Romulan uniforms circa TNG. I may not remember the clear passage of time and the order in which it happened, but I remember bits and pieces, and know that it wasn't all bad.

I also realize now, in retrospect, that I was beginning to see the side effects of the prednisone and the toll it was taking on my body. Those came into even more sharp relief after I was discharged and I was finally able to identify them, but at the time I thought I was fine, and was relieved that my vision seemed to be improving slightly from near total blindness. Hot flashes, increased anxiety, blood pressure, heart rate, etc. More on that later.

On Saturday Mom arrived. I won't ever begin to be able to thank my mother enough for dropping everything and flying across the world to be at my side when I fell ill, or for everything she did and had to endure herself while here, so I'm just going to mention how awesome it was to not only have mom time, but to be able to pick her medical knowledge brain, since she's been an RN for forever. I'd had my last IV dose of prednisone the day before and my discharge status was pretty unknown, because of the change in my doctor, but we were hoping I would be given at least one more day to readjust.

I met Dr. Victoria Mifsud that afternoon shortly after my mother came in, and I was instantly reassured I was in the right place with the right doctor for me. She spent a good long time with us answering all the questions that we had managed to come up with, explained the disease, reviewed my MRI scans again for the benefit of my mom, and let me know what treatment options were out there and then talked me through them and helped me pick the one we thought would be best for me. We decided on Gilenya, which is one of the first oral treatments approved for MS. Because the first dose of Gilenya has to be administered under supervision, we agreed that it would be best for me to stay in the hospital to just go ahead and get set up with long term treatment as we were only waiting on one more test. Dr. Victoria also got me set up with a few other doctors I needed to see while I was in, as well as an occupational therapist to help me with the new challenges that MS and being functionally blind in one eye (at least temporarily) would bring.

I wound up being discharged earlier than expected because something happened with the test getting shipped to the wrong place, and what should have been results in days would have been weeks and we didn't want to keep me in the hospital that long. I was relieved to finally be going home. I'd never been hospitalized before this experience, and by that point I was pretty tired of it. Cleveland Clinic may have been the best possible hospital experience I ever could have asked for, but one can only sit in a room for so long...

Mom, Jon, and I piled into the Kia and headed home. We had celebratory Burger Fuel that night as I was starving and sick of hospital food, which honestly wasn't bad, but had gotten predictable and bland. I even avoided the bun knowing that I probably didn't want to try sneaking gluten like I have been (I was diagnosed gluten intolerant three months ago) and messing up my stomach, since I'd been restricted to a strictly gluten free diet while I was in the hospital. I felt fine. I felt great to be home.

I had no idea what was coming with the rest of the prednisone, despite warnings from both my mother and the pharmacist who'd dispensed it that it was a horrible drug. I'd been taking it in the hospital and doing okay, right?

Wrong, but that's a story for another time.

Hello, can you hear me? I'm calling from the outside.

I honestly don't even know where to start this entry. But often, starting is the hardest part, isn't it? I do it a lot as a person. Starting something, doing well, and then just stopping. I'm not sure what exactly happens every time, but there comes a point where I leave something off and then I think, oh, I can't go back to that. Time to start over.

In fact, I've got a half written post about Heidelberg sitting in the drafts section here I totally forgot about, and I never got around to writing about Toulouse either. I'm sure there's a ton of "stuff that only happens in the UAE" posts I've wanted to share and forgotten about. And now, it may be a good long while before I write about Siena.

Siena was lovely. Siena was beautiful, relaxing, serene. Siena was also where all of this started.

The day I was out on a sightseeing tour of the Chianti region by myself, there came a point where I started to feel like I had something in my eye. Figuring I just had an eyelash or something, I washed it out. Everything was fine. Then, the next day, while walking around with Jon who'd finally gotten a break from his experiments, I finally -saw- something in my eye. I told him about it, but it was never more than a minor annoyance. We flew home the next day, on an overnight. The pain in my eye was there again, steady but never intense. I figured I'd have it looked at when we got home. The next day, both being exhausted, we pretty much just slept. I wasn't really concerned with the eye at that time because I knew it would be something I'd get checked out. And I did, the next day.

Well, sort of. Monday, November 16th, I had an orthopedist appointment at 10am. I'd been having some sort of weird sensation loss in my feet, and my GP recommended before I left for Siena that I see the ortho. Pinched nerve, probably. I sent my GP an email that morning about the eye, and she recommended I just see another GP while I was at the hospital so I wouldn't have to go back and forth. I agreed and scheduled an appointment with the GP on that day at Harley Street, where my ortho is. Ortho gave me more muscle cream and patches, said it was probably overwork and stress because I have messed up feet and that if it didn't clear in a few weeks we'd reassess. I filled my scripts and had some time before my next appointment at 1p, so I went to the mall that's right next door.

I should interject here that I had, at this point, done something silly and stubborn. My vision was starting to cloud a little more in my right eye, but I could still see fairly well, so I drove myself to the doctor that morning. I didn't want my husband to have to take me since he had work, and I didn't feel like grabbing a cab, and as I've said about forty times before, this was minor. It wasn't until I was talking to the GP that I really noticed a -blind- spot. She told me she thought I needed to be seen by an ophthalmologist immediately, but she thought it was just a scratch (AGAIN WITH THE SCRATCH), and handed me a referral letter. She also told me not to drive, so I called Jon, updated him on the situation, and then called Cleveland Clinic because I knew they'd just opened a new Eye Institute.

I talked to the appointment people on the phone, explained the situation and that I really needed to be seen today, and then after much back and forth they put a nurse on the phone, so that I'd be sure to get to the right place. She talked to me for a few minutes, and then said "I'm going to give you some advice, and you need to follow it, okay?" and then she told me I needed to come into the ED immediately instead of going to the Eye Clinic. I called Jon, who took a cab to come pick up the car, and I took the cab over to Cleveland.

It took not even five minutes after I walked in to be seen by an ER doctor, who was very kind, and began running all of the tests he knew, examining my eye. After exhausting his options and calling to consult with the ophthalmologist, he convinced them to see me in the eye clinic even though they were done for the day. I went across the hospital to the clinic, where we ran the tests and that's when I got the news that I wouldn't be going home that night after all. Of course by this point, I'd all but lost functional sight in my right eye. I could see things on the periphery, but there was a big white spot where sight should have been.

As another aside, I can't rave enough about my experiences at Cleveland Clinic, and I do well plan on doing that, but not in this post because I want to be able to give each and every person who gave me such excellent care the attention they deserve, and that will just make this too long because I still have too much to say.

The doctor, his nurse, and the imaging tech all came in at once to the room. They told me I might want to call my husband, and that was the first point where I really realized that something was badly wrong here. Besides the near total blindness, which I hadn't actually had the chance to sit down and notice because I'd been so busy and my other eye had kicked into high gear to compensate. They told me that I had a condition called optic neuritis which required hospitalization for treatment, and that they'd be admitting me. After the initial shock, I was in total disbelief. I'd been told once today that this was nothing big, I thought it was minor, and here I was going into the hospital? I hadn't been back from vacation for two days. This was crazy.

He explained that he'd consulted with a neurologist and that they were admitting me, and I just needed to wait for them to have a room ready and they'd get me settled in to the hospital. And then I finally heard it for the first time. "You should know this is often a first symptom in multiple sclerosis."

Um, what? I had a scratch. My eye is going to be fine. I don't have MS. Okay, so my eye is not okay, but that doesn't mean I have MS. I don't even know exactly what MS is. Sure, I'd heard about multiple sclerosis before, and I knew people who had it, but it's not like I was familiar with the disease myself.

I finally got admitted and settled into a room on the 10th floor, the neuro ward, and Jon finally caught up with me. The neuro on call came in to explain that my consulting physician would be in in the morning, but that he'd given the orders to go ahead and start the IV steroid treatment right away, and we'd begin the testing and MRI battery the next day to identify the cause, which was okay, because by this point it was late in the evening and we were in the hospital unexpectedly and I was tired and just wanted to sleep. I had to call my mom and let her know I was in the hospital, so I did, and I and the nurse assured her that I was in good hands and that everything was going to be okay and that there was no need to rush over because it could just be a random ON flair up and that it happened for things other than MS, and that we would all know and feel better after the tests.

So the next day I had my MRIs, and then at about 8 that night, my doctor walked in and told me it was pretty well confirmed by the scans that I did in fact have MS. So much so that he didn't feel the need to do the spinal tap. It was just a complete and total shock.

I'm not ready to put the rest of this experience out there just yet, and this is long enough, so we probably have a good stopping place. I should explain my title: I just recently heard the new Adele song, and love it so much, and thought it fit so well because that's what this whole thing has totally felt like. Calling myself from the outside. I'm not sure if anyone has answered yet or not.

Oman, What a Road Trip: Pt. 1 - Al Ain and Nizwa

I couldn't resist making that excellent title pun, and I'm not going to apologize for it.

It seems like a lot of my posts have just been about our travels, recently, but I'm going to try to post more about day-to-day life in Abu Dhabi, too. First, however, I need to talk about this awesome road trip we took over Spring Break.

Wait, what? Road trip, you say? Didn't you say you weren't gonna own a car?

Yes, we had originally intended to live like city folk and not have a car while we were here. Honestly, our taxi system was working just fine - and reasonably cheaply too - but we both sort of missed the freedom that comes from having your own method of transportation, and being able to go where you wanted when you wanted (you can do this with cabs, too, but there's always the "is there going to be a cab waiting or do I have to call?" aspect). Also, it's nice to have someone driving who doesn't treat every trip like they're qualifying for the next F1 race, which is very much a cabbie thing around here. Usually my motion sickness is triggered by only boat trips, wild theme park rides, etc - but riding around with some of these guys has made me positively green at times. Fortunately, Jon not only likes to drive, he's a sight better at it.

Meet Kaylee.

There she is, our beautiful Kia Cerato. The Cerato is the cousin of the Forte (in the US) and the C'd (in the UK). The C'd is also the most recent Top Gear Reasonably Priced Car (RIP, Top Gear). Her color is officially called "Planet Blue" but it's some sort of ambiguous blue/grey hybrid. She's not the fanciest or the flashiest - she does share the car park with no less than 4 Porches, a Challenger, and a tricked out Corvette - but she does her job well and is quite comfortable for us. We're also pretty sure she has enough backseat room for us to comfortably fit passengers. Or the cat. She earned the name Kaylee after our favorite Firefly character, after some heated debated, for reasons I'd be happy to discuss if you asked me.

So now we have the wheels. Originally for SB I had this magnificent trip to Jordan and Petra planned, but right around the time I started looking into booking, Jordan got involved in certain regional conflicts and that made us slightly more nervous about traveling there. It would seem it's not just us, because I've seen more tourism ads for Jordan lately than anywhere else - they must really be hurting in that department. We figured maybe it wasn't close to travel there so soon after the events, so we decided to put Jordan off for another time. I will get there and to Petra before we leave this region, though. I mean, I'd likely never return just for that purpose.

After Jordan plans fell through, we had to do a bit more quick thinking. We talked about going to Turkey, but weren't jazzed too much about flying I think; we're flying next week to Toulouse for a conference for Jon, and it would've put the trips too close together. So we (I) decided we'd put our newfound freedom to the test and take Kaylee out for a 6 day, 5 night road trip through the region (namely, Al Ain and Oman). I borrowed a guidebook and a map (plus travel itinerary ideas) from my good friend Lise, and buckled down to work out the logistics.

I'd been to Al Ain once before on a Community Life trip to the zoo (the post for which is forthcoming, lost somewhere in my backlog), and instantly fell in love with the city and the scenery. I've been trying to convince Jon to go back ever since. So the plan was to hit the road on Wed, meandering to Al Ain at our own pace, and then staying at the hotel that night atop Jebel Hafeet - the UAE's second highest named peak, but the only one that is accessible. From there, we would travel into Oman, spending one night in Nizwa and two in Muscat. From Muscat, we would take the fast travel ferry (that also takes cars!) up to the Musandam Peninsula to Khasab, where we'd stay another night. After Khasab we'd come back to the Emirates and spend a night in Ras al Khaimah on the beach, rather than Dubai - neither of us were really excited about driving or staying in the city.

We hired a great pet sitter to look after Lord Baelish, and took off Wed morning. Almost immediately, we ran into fun times.

Jon had printed off directions from Google about how to get to Al Ain. I wasn't sure we needed them, as I was fairly certain I could manage to navigate us there myself, and because I have unlimited data in the UAE I could just use my phone as a GPS. I figured it was a good idea to have a backup, though. Trusting the printout, I didn't use my phone. Classic road trip mistake number one. Somehow we got turned around at an exit somewhere, and wound up taking E11 in the WRONG DIRECTION. It wasn't until we'd been on the road an hour or so that we realized, we were heading towards Dubai. At this point, I couldn't reroute my GPS because I didn't have any signal, and we had no idea where we'd gotten lost at...so we stopped and bought a map. An actual, physical map. When was the last time anyone used one of those? Turns out we bobbed when we should've weaved, metaphorically speaking, so we turned around and an hour later were on the right road to Al Ain.

Al Ain is the second largest city in the Abu Dhabi Emirate (the first being...Abu Dhabi) and the fourth largest in the UAE. It was the birthplace of the UAE's first President, and is centered around an oasis. Thanks to the oasis, it's sometimes called the Garden City, and for good reason - Al Ain is truly a change of pace from the usual scenery around here. A breath of fresh air, or life, if you will. Jon and I sat down the night before and picked out what sorts of things we wanted to see in Al Ain, and once we arrived in the city, headed off to visit them. Wanting to skip the overt tourist traps, we decided on Al Jahili Fort and the Al Ain National Museum.

Al Jahili Fort is a reconstruction of a fort built in the late 1800s, as a royal summer residence and also general Fort for Sheikh Zayed the First. Today it serves as a lankmark and a home for an exhibition on Wilfred Thesiger, a British explorer and writer who penned Arabian Sands, a travel narrative about his crossing of the Empty Quarter and the mountains of Oman.

Al Jahili Fort

Interior shot

Watchtower

After the fort, we maneuvered through Al Ain City to the National Museum using my excellent skills as expert navigator - which is to say, we got there eventually with some creative estimation and driving. For a place that was the equivalent of like, 6 city blocks over, it sure was incredibly hard to find. The National Museum is the oldest in the UAE, built by Sheikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al Nayhan (the man instrumental in the formation of the UAE and also its first president - the grandson of Zayed the First). It's not the biggest or most luxurious museum (which is a feat in a country known for big luxury), but it is pretty cool if you're in to actual historical exhibits (Al Ain's other museum is in the Palace and is more about the life of royalty). The National Museum houses archeological artifacts from the Hili Archeological Site on the outskirts of Al Ain, has ethnographic exhibits on life in the UAE, and a really neat collection of all of the gifts Sheikh Zayed received during his rule from other nations.

Dudes doing stuff (I can't remember the name of the exhibit)

A handwritten Quran with a pearl inlay cover,
gifted to Sheikh Zayed

Topological map of the UAE circa before unification

Once we'd finished exploring the National museum, we figured we'd had enough after driving around all day and decided to head to the hotel. Needless to say, we got turned around trying to find the road to Jebel Hafeet...but once we started going up it, we pretty much forgot the struggle. We stayed that night at the Mercure Grand, a very 70s sheek hotel at the top of the mountain, and prepared for our border crossing into Oman towards Nizwa the next day.

Heading towards Jebel Hafeet

On the road up

Yo, the 70s called...

The views were stunning, but hazy.

The next morning, we got packed up and headed back down the mountain towards the UAE-Oman border. There are four places to cross near Al Ain - one of them north of the city, two inside but one restricted to GCC nationals only, and the one south of town, the border near Jebel Hafeet. After researching, it was the easiest to pass and also the shortest crossing. We arrived on the UAE side, waited for our exit stamps, and were through to Oman with no hassle for our entry stamps. We had a mild moment of panic, because the first road signs we saw were all in Arabic, but like the UAE, Oman seems to have a requirement that all signs be in both Arabic and English (the important ones, anyway). We passed through border control easily and took off for Nizwa, which, according to our guidebook, is a very popular tourist destination these days, despite the fact that only 50 years ago Thesiger was forced to steer clear of it during his crossing of the Empty Quarter, because his Bedouin guides were convinced it was too fiercely conservative for him.

The road from Jebel Hafeet to Nizwa is roughly 3 hours, under the best of conditions. We must have traveled through a gazillion roundabouts (thanks for that, Brits!) and a ton of construction closer to Nizwa, but we weren't prepared for just how gorgeous the drive was. The flat desert soon gave way to views of Oman's stunning mountains, and the drive takes you right past Jebel Shams, the highest peak. One of the attractions of staying in Nizwa is its proximity to the mountains. Jebel Shams also borders the Omani Grand Canyon, Wadi Ghul. Sadly, we didn't get to see these stunning views up close because I sort of neglected to read the part where the roads up these mountains were only accessible by 4WD vehicles, and while Kaylee is an awesome ride, she is definitely not 4WD. There were a few places noted in the guidebook as worth a visit in Nizwa, namely the Fort, that we decided we wanted to explore, however.

Welcome to Oman. Here, have some mountains.

Passing a camel carrier. Can't they
just walk?!

Mountains

Beauty.

Once we got into Nizwa, we ran into another one of those unique to the ME navigation problems - the maps and directions, though scarcely a couple of years old, were out of date, due to the rapid construction and expansion. Several roundabouts listed as such no longer existed, and had been turned into full blown intersections. Like the major one where we were supposed to turn to get to our hotel, but didn't and wound up wedged on a tiny alley in a small part of the city. Or the one where you couldn't actually turn into the hotel but instead had to head further down and turn around. Or the one to the fort, that we could see as we drove past several times but never could quite find a way into, or a parking lot...

Once we finally checked in to our hotel, which was nice enough but was also undergoing renovations, we decided to just rest and refresh in Nizwa and see if we couldn't explore the next day before we left for Muscat. We needed to visit a money changer, also. Now Nizwa, while pitched as a popular tourist destination, isn't the most tourist friendly of places. We were sent to the LuLu hypermarket to find an exchange, despite passing several smaller local banks on the way there. Nizwa is also what I would classify as still fairly conservative. I consistently respect the culture I live in and never dress in any manner that shows my knees or shoulders, yet in Nizwa I still felt uncomfortable. The locals outside of the hotel clearly weren't used to visitors wandering around, and also seemed not used to western dress. In fact, I only saw two other women who weren't wearing a hijab, and began to wonder if it was something that was expected there (obviously not, seeing as it is not law in Oman and there were others who weren't covered). The workers at the exchange seemed to view us as a novelty, and were totally baffled by our American passports. We changed our dirhams to riyals, and headed back to the hotel.

Not too shabby a view from the parking lot.

I don't mean to give off the idea that I didn't like Nizwa, or that you shouldn't stay there. I just want to accurately relay my experience as much as possible. This includes, for me at least, describing situations that aren't necessarily positive ones. The ME has taught me a lot about not letting small things color your experiences, because you will inevitably run into them no matter how hard you try or plan. Something that seems as simple as a regional road trip is always full of surprises and monkey wrenches.

If you're traveling through to Muscat and want to break up the drive, or you want a place to stay near Jebel Shams/Wadi Ghul/the historic village of Bahla, Nizwa's a place with a good location, fabulous restaurants (at least the one attached to our hotel was), and a small town feel. It's worth noting that all of the main roads through the city seem to be under construction currently, and there is some definite re-routing and odd maneuvering that has to be done to get around. We enjoyed the hospitality at our hotel and its restaurant. After dinner we relaxed with tea and desert, and then headed back to the room for a good night's sleep before our trip to Muscat.

November and December 2014 (in a nutshell)!

I'll be honest, this isn't going to be a long post because November and December were decidedly slow and relatively unexciting months for me. A while back on the blog I posted that we were booking a trip to Thailand for Christmas, which was in fact our plan - this being my first real Christmas FAR away from home, I really didn't want to spend it in Abu Dhabi, and we had a nice long winter break in which to take a trip. So we booked my dream Thailand trip - Chiang Mai and Bangkok, a whole week's worth of travel and touring.

Only that never actually happened. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

November was a quiet month, and I was going back through my pictures trying to remember if there was really anything of note to post about other than our tiny Thanksgiving when I realized that something very, very important and life changing actually DID happen in November.

The very first picture of Lord Petyr Baelish (Rogers)

Early November, a post was put on our community Facebook group about a kitten in need of a serious home. He'd been found by another faculty member on campus, and nursed back to health, but she couldn't keep him because he was a very active kitten and needed someone who was home more than just in the evening after work. I put on my best Puss in Boots eyes and showed the post to Jon.

Firstly, I should explain. We both have cats back home in the States that we absolutely love to pieces. They are our furry children, and we wept when we realized that it was not financially viable to bring them with us. We tried. We researched so many different methods and costs and companies in an effort to bring them here. Yet eventually, Khan and Titan were re-homed with our relatives back in the U.S. so that we could embark on our adventure knowing they were in good hands. Technically, our babies are just in foster care until we return, and we can reunite and have one big happy (albeit furry) family.

Jon and I talked about it at length, once we got here, knowing that Abu Dhabi was crawling with cats needing homes, and we even considered fostering for a while. We eventually decided against it, realizing that it would be absolutely impossible for us to foster a cat because we'd just fall in love with it and be heartbroken when the time came to say goodbye. So the discussion was quietly closed and we moved on with our terribly quiet, catless lives.

And then came this post about the kitten needing help. I couldn't stand it. How could I say no to a kitten needing help?! It was perfect, because I, unable to find work, was home most days anyway. He'd have a near constant companion to keep watch on him. So I showed Jon the post, and the minute I did, I realized he'd been struggling with our decision too. There wasn't much discussion after that. We took the kitten in, named him Baelish, and never looked back. Today, after some struggles getting fully well (he was incredibly sick, near death, when his first mom found him), he's a happy, healthy, absolute terror of a best friend to both of us. I'm going to struggle not to turn this into a "pictures of my cat being adorable" blog.

Just look at that lordly face.

The rest of November passed fairly quietly. Jon and I celebrated Thanksgiving in a big way by ourselves in our apartment, making loads and loads of the delicious food we were so craving from the celebrations that were happening at home. I just realized, writing this post, that I don't have any pictures of our spread, for some reason. I'm not sure how that happened. Suffice to say that it was delicious: we had a turkey, homemade stuffing (my first time making it!), sweet potato casserole, dinner rolls, gravy, mashed potatoes, etc, etc. We had leftovers for weeks. Turkey coming out of our ears.

December was an absolute roller coaster of a month, and in the end, not in a good way. This is the part where I explained what happened to our Thailand trip that I was so, so looking forward to.

We'd booked the trip with a travel agency admittedly a little late in the game (we kept putting off finding a trip and then once we started it took forever to finally get what we wanted out of one), but the minute we'd gotten confirmation that we were in fact booked, I sent the payment through wire transfer to the travel agency. Apparently this was more mind-boggling technology than they could handle, even though the gave me account numbers specifically meant for wiring money. To make a long and aggravating story short, they told me they wouldn't officially book our tickets until they received our payment, and then claimed for a good week and a half that they never received it, waiting until pretty much the day before we were supposed to have flown out to say they had it. Needless to say, by that point I had, after several back and forth emails, phone calls, and generally unpleasant exchanges, already told them where they could stuff the trip that we would not be taking (keep in mind they were telling us that they wouldn't issue us tickets until they received the money, so in their eyes we weren't taking it either - I just eventually made the decision to avoid the frustration and cancel the whole thing so we didn't lose money/get slammed with late fees/miss a flight).

So we spent Christmas in Abu Dhabi. It really wasn't that bad.

Even before/alongside/after all of the trip drama, December was an okay sort of month. We bought a live Christmas tree and had it imported all the way from Canada, and it gave our apartment a lovely Christmas pine fresh smell for weeks and weeks and weeks. We bought new (cat safe, which was suddenly very important) ornaments to start our collection together and decorated it. It was huge and gorgeous. So full. Probably one of the prettiest, freshest live trees I've ever had, and that is a totally weird thing to say because we live in ABU DHABI. It also provided our newest household member with endless hours of entertainment, as he would climb it in the middle of the night and knock off ornaments that he would then hide under the couch.

Our first tree as the Rogers. See all the pine needles?
Turns out the tree wasn't dying, it was just being attacked by the cat.

Photo proof that the attacks were happening. And a Dalek.

HELLO HUSBAND, HAVE A CAMEL SELFIE.

Jon did his best to make sure that we had an awesome Christmas despite everything, and he really came through. He was gone to Australia on a conference trip the first weekend in December, so I took myself to the Swiss Christmas Market and had a ball hanging out with our friends Laura and Jeff and their two girls. I also bought him a present that he found when he arrived back home at 4 am while I was still sleeping.

I bought him the majestic piece of wall art you see above. I mean, I'd been looking at bare white walls since the end of July. It was driving me nuts. (Okay, this purchase was probably more for me.)

He also graciously took me to see a production of the Nutcracker by the Moscow City Ballet. It was gorgeous. The Nutcracker is pretty much a Christmas tradition for me, because growing up Oma would take us every year to see it put on in Lake City. I hadn't seen it in years, so when I saw it was coming to Abu Dhabi I was super excited. Bored as he was, Jon stuck it out for me. I have the best husband. He even decorated a gingerbread house and helped me bake Christmas cookies.

Yea, we're nerds.

Still not as good as Oma's.

When Christmas Eve came, we had our tiny Christmas feast. After learning our lesson at Thanksgiving, this time we scaled things back a bit. We did absolutely have a ham. Jon knows how much I love ham, and insisted that we would get one. I made a corn casserole and he made yeast rolls. We compromised and had some peas, too. You know, vegetables being part of a square meal and all. Also, we had Opa's Pineapple Punch. While not as delicious, it was definitely as potent.

Dinner complete with Santa hat.

Christmas Day came with an unexpected gift - a planned but unannounced power/water outage! What were we to do, stuck at home on Christmas with no utilities?

Bump that. We went to the beach. And that, folks, is the end of 2014.

The beach property management made this inspired creation.

Santa's little helper.

Christmas, Abu Dhabi style.

October 2014 in a Nutshell

Seeing as how it's November, rather than writing all of the separate posts that I was planning on writing in October, I'm just going to lump them all into one big summary. Summaries are exciting, you guys!

October was kind of a blitz month for me, which was a nice change from my usual/current speed of not working and not doing much else besides weekly coffee morning outings and relentless job hunting (which has become nothing short of a nightmare. I've now been out of work since May, and unemployment doesn't really agree with me).

The start of October was our Sri Lanka trip, which I've talked about over the past few posts, but in probably the best turn of events ever, we actually got to turn our mini Sri Lankan vacation into an extended one. At the time, the majority of campus was still running on generator power, having not been hooked up to the city grid, and administration chose the holiday weekend/week to make the switchover. Jon and I knew we were coming back the day of the changeover, and somewhat planned it that way - because the power was going to be out in our apartment for a potential 48 hours, residents were being moved to a hotel for the transition period. So after 3 days in Sri Lanka, Jon and I got to stay nearly 3 more days in a hotel when we got back to Abu Dhabi.

But not just ANY hotel, mind you - we were being put up in the RITZ CARLTON in Abu Dhabi. A proper five star hotel, after our "five-star" hotel experience in Sri Lanka. We landed back in Abu Dhabi about an hour before the buses departed campus, so we headed back, changed out our suitcases, and hopped a bus to the hotel. The Ritz lived up to its reputation from the very start - extravagance, to a T. We were speedily checked in and shown to our rooms, and then invited to the lunch buffet that had been specifically catered for our group, since the normal lunch buffet was closed by the time we checked in.

I'm not going to lie - I took full advantage of the glorious lazy rest the stay at the Ritz offered us, not to mention spending the majority of our time at the pool (since the pool here JUST opened about a week ago). The first night we were there happened to be French night in the buffet restaurant, which was a crazy experience because in addition to the traditional buffet style it normally offered, they were also offering a sort of fresh market experience, with little stalls of seafood, meats, etc that you could pick out and then they would cook to order and bring to your table. I indulged in some duck and a particularly expensive cut of steak, and the numerous and glorious sides and desserts that came along with the offer. Did I mention, as part of being put up in this hotel for the transition, that all our meals in the buffet restaurant were included? We simply had to pay extra for alcohol/food outside of the buffet if we wanted it, the entire stay.

Jon and I enjoyed a very good night's sleep after being thoroughly worn out from Sri Lanka, and then as I've said before, spent the next couple of days by the pool. Highlights below:

Our room came with plush Ritz robes for "use at the hotel".

The large, luxurious spa tub

The LEAST romantic part of our room - we wound up with two twin beds you couldn't push together. Alas, I could not squish Jon in his sleep.

And Ritz slippers, which were not just for hotel use
and I promptly liberated upon leaving.

However, our room came with an EXCELLENT view of the Grand Mosque.

The pool, i.e. my home for two days

Ahhhh, REAL luxury.

After our glorious stay at the Ritz, October pretty much got back to business as usual, until an offer came up to volunteer at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival. Looking for something to occupy myself with, I applied to be a volunteer, and then after digging a bit on their website, noticed that they were also looking for interns. As I've said, I've been looking for work since I got here, and was not above spending some free labor time to get in good with some people. Plus, a film festival sounded exciting. I sent in my CV and basically forgot about it for a while, writing it off as another failed attempt at work. To my surprise, I was emailed back by the volunteer coordinator, asking if she could call me and discuss the open options. After our chat, I was told that there were two departments still looking for a intern - Guest Relations and Industry, though both were pretty much the same job - which sounded like basic customer service/guest babysitting. I told her to forward my CV on to both teams, and to my surprise, got a call the next day from the Industry Guest Coordinator. Long story short, he needed an intern to help him during the festival because he had to handle 90 something guests all on his own.

I enjoyed working for ADFF so much that I'm most likely going to do it again this year. I got to meet lots of interesting people and industry big wigs (including comedian Ronnie Khalil and Cheryl Boone Isaacs, president of the Academy. THE ACADEMY). I got to see lots of great films for free (job perks!), all of which probably deserve their own blog post reviews, but instead will settle for honorable mention here: Art and Craft, Difret, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, and, as a special bonus, Big Hero 6. We were actually the first audience to see the film in 3D in the world. Pretty prestigious. The premiere also happened to be Jon's birthday, and since I had to work that day and the week leading up to it, I got us both tickets to the movie that night and the fancy film festival awards show before. I like to think it was a pretty cool birthday gift.

ADFF ended and so did October, which pushed us forward into Festive Season in the UAE. But that's a story for another post.

The Great Blogging Failure of 2014

So, I totally understand if no one reads this blog anymore. I sort of abandoned it like a red-headed stepchild. Seriously, I'm worse than Cinderella's stepmother over here with this blog. I didn't even give it anything to do like cleaning. I even found a half written post I'd started mid-November recapping my experiences in October. I'm going to post that later, so that everyone still has a chance to read the last fully written thing I wrote here, but I wanted to post this first.

There should be a lot more blog posts here, I know. There aren't. Chalk it up to any number of factors - I'm a major procrastinator. I'm lazy. I didn't want to do it. I don't usually think my life is interesting enough to blog about. I didn't really have anything to blog about because the last few months I've kinda been in a sedentary funk due to another number of combining factors. I could give you a lot of excuses, none of them good enough, really. I have nothing BUT time in which to write.

I also am not going to sit here and promise that I've made some sort of resolution that 2015 is going to be better. That it's going to be the year I blog regularly and timely about all of my experiences. I CAN promise to TRY to be better about it, going forward. The latter half of January going into February has really picked up around here, and I'm slowly coming out of the holiday/winter funk, so I've got things to blog about again.

So, look forward to a slew of posts coming in the next couple of days. I'm going to finish the October recap and put it out first, and then I will probably bundle Nov & Dec into one post and January into another, instead of writing about every single experience separately, just to catch up. Also... those probably wouldn't fill their own blog posts anyway.

So, my 2015 commitment is to this blog. Resolutions are silly. They have like a 90% failure rate. I will, however, set reasonable,  healthy goals going forward - one of which is to blog a little more (regularly).