Tuesday, January 31, 2017

Happy New Year!!!!!

Welcome to 2017 everyone. In keeping with my tradition, there are five exclamation points in the title since this is my fifth Happy New Year post in the history of this blog.

This post will be a recap of 2016, followed by some musings about where things go from here.

Here is what happened with the blog in 2016:
  • 11 new blog posts were written. (Down from 17 in 2015)
  • 6 articles were reviewed. (Up from 4 in 2015)
  • 24 additional countries visited the blog, bringing the total to 132. (That is more new country visits than occurred in 2015 (7) or 2014 (22).)
  • The blog received only 1 spam comment in 2016, which heaped a great deal of praise upon Dr. Ogun, the great healer, whose amazing herbal remedies cured the commenter of his KINDLY PROBLEM.

In personal news, at my annual physical exam in February of 2016 my doctor informed me that I had iron-deficiency anemia. That led to the following series of tests to check for sources of bleeding in my GI tract:

  • February: Colonoscopy and endoscopy
  • May: Small bowel follow through exam
  • June: Capsule endoscopy #1 (camera did not work)
  • July: Capsule endoscopy #2 (camera did work)

Since no abnormalities were found during any of those tests, I saw a hematologist in September who recommended I start taking iron supplements as a first step to see how my body responded. By late December my hemoglobin and ferritin were back in the normal range, as were the other numbers related to red blood cells, so I stopped taking iron supplements at the end of the year. We will see where those numbers are at my next physical exam in February.

That wraps up 2016. There are a few recent articles I still hope to review in 2017, and there are a few blog-related projects that I hope to make some progress on. And of course the big event in 2017 is the hereditary amyloidosis support group meeting in Chicago the last weekend of October. More information and a link to register for that meeting can be found here: http://amyloidosissupport.org/support_groups/familial.html. Hopefully we can have a large turnout for the Fibrinogen Alliance.


=====Monthly Blog Status Update=====

As of December 31, 2016:

Total posts: 173 (1 in December)

Total pageviews: 52,800 (~1400 in December)

Email subscribers: 14 (unchanged)

Total number of countries that have viewed the blog: 132

No new countries viewed the blog in December.
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