Greetings all,

I've recently come back to the forums here at gamesas to once again benefit from the collective knowledge of this awesome community. I started out here some years back when I was playing TES4, Oblivion, and have returned now that I have picked up TES3, Morrowind (what an incredible game, BTW... can't believe I missed out on its awesomeness for so long!) And, I should take a sec to say, it's good to be back! In one of the posts I made in another poster's thread, I mentioned that I was back in Tamriel because I suddenly had tons of time on my hands due to illness. I should not have been surprised by the kindness here, but next thing you know I had people wishing me well in someone else's thread. I am so grateful for the kind thoughts and words, but I did not mean to hijack the thread. So I decided to come here and talk about it more, in case anyone is really interested.

Anyway, I got out of gaming completely for a while after TES4. I played it constantly... first vanilla, and then heavily modded. But then I got a killer job doing highly competitive Web Development (I had jobs before, but not killer ones that really consumed me), and that left no room in my life for gaming. And it was OK, because I liked what I was doing and that made me and my family happier. Things were good.

Skip to last spring... I had been feeling rough for a while; some of the earliest symptoms had started worming their way into my life as much as three years ago. But for the most part I was able to get along pretty well, and so I chalked the aches and pains up to my advancing age (which isn't really that advanced, but I was actively trying to downplay the whole thing, you see). But then, over the course of a few weeks in the early summer, it got really bad. My feet hurt so much I could barely walk on them anymore. My hands and fingers ached from the moment I woke til I went to sleep at night (that's really bad for a person who works on a keyboard, needless to say). I began to have difficulty concentrating, and I would frequently forget what I was doing in the middle of a task. There was more, but as you can probably tell, it was clear something was wrong, and it wasn't "old age".

There's a lot to how I finally got a good diagnosis... enough that it could be its own story! But I'm going to skip all of that for now and just tell you that, completely out of serendipity, I found the right doc. She had immediate suspicions and ran some tests. The tests confirmed her suspicions, and she soon called me to let me know that I am suffering from Chronic Lyme Disease.

I don't know how much you may know about Chronic Lyme Disease. There's more to it than I can tell you here, so I won't really try. What I can tell you is that it is nothing like acute Lyme Disease, which is the type most people are somewhat familiar with. Acute Lyme is generally quite curable, albeit not quite as easily and harmlessly as some would have you believe. If it's caught early and treated vigorously with aggressive antibiotics, acute Lyme can be cured in usually 6 - 8 weeks.

When it is not caught early, however, it becomes something else altogether. It mimics some 300 other diseases, including Rheumatoid Arthritis, Multiple Sclerosis, Fibromyalgia, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Lupus, and Alzheimer's Disease. In most people with Chronic Lyme Disease, the initial infection took place years before the symptoms began to present themselves. Based on my labs, for example, my doctor believes that I was initially infected 15 - 20 years ago. In that time, the borrelia burgdorferi bacteria were working their way deeply into my body's systems. Today, I am suffering from a menagerie of neurological symptoms because it is wreaking havoc on my nervous system (particularly my brain... awesome, huh? Sorry, I don't mean to be snarky, it just comes out that way sometimes). I have daily pain in almost every joint in my body. I have neuropathy in my hands and feet which has forced me to start walking with a cane, and has greatly limited how much time I can spend on a computer. My mind is so scattered and unfocused these days that I find anolytic thought to be daunting at best, another issue that makes my work nearly impossible. I have to write simple things down so I don't forget them... how crazy is that??? I guess everyone has their own personal expectations regarding what they should be able to do, and how easy/difficult any given task should be for them. But I can tell you this for certain: this is not me! I've always seen myself as a very thorough and complete person when it comes to my work... every "i" dotted and every "t" crossed. Not having what I consider to be full control of my mind is.... well, it's damned maddening, that's what it is!

OK, I've spent a lot of time on the Lyme, but not much on the escapism.... allow me to shift gears...

When things started getting bad, especially with my hands, my 20 year-old step-son still lived here with us, and he had the XBox 360 we got him for his birthday a while back. When we bought Skyrim for him, I was still working pretty heavily. But by last summer I had already lost a lot of my capacity to do much programming, and was finding myself with more and more time on my hands. I was actually pretty happy at first to have some time to learn Skyrim, and even happier with how the XBox controller felt in my hands... it didn't hurt much at all to use it, and that was awesome! Consoles aren't my favorite way to play games, but this experience was not bad at all, and I really liked some of the improvements Bethesda made (I really didn't like some of the others, but that's a different thread!) But then my step-son moved out in late summer, and once again I was looking for... something...

My old gaming PC, the one I had played so many hours of TES4 on, died a while back. All I have now is an old Linux tower I use as a file/media server, and this here laptop I'm typing on. The laptop has a great i7 processor, and 8 GB of RAM... but the integrated graphics card is nothing to write home about (hell, it's nothing to write anyone about!) As an exercise in futility I tried to install Oblivion. It actually loaded and ran, but as soon as it got past the intro movie to where you can move around and stuff, the machine just plain shut down! Ha! None of the "maybe it will, maybe it won't" run the game this time.... it definitely will not!

But then I remembered... I have a Steam account, and people have always told me TES3 is the best TES there is... maybe I'll check that out. Well, I did, and after a little tweaking to get it to run satisfactorily, I can say that I agree... Morrowind is the best TES in my opinion, too. It is soooo immersive; I find it to be much more immersive than either Oblivion or Skyrim. I have been playing for a few months now, and I still have so much land covered by the fog of war. I'll be playing this for a very long time, and that's just with my first character; I'm already thinking of the next couple of characters I'd like to try in my next play-through(s).

But these are things I could have said before I became ill. What's changed now? Well, for one thing, it hurts to play, literally. My hands just won't let me play for hours on end like I used to. I'm back to the ol' keyboard/mouse setup, but I'm thinking about trying to find something else that fits my hands better like the XBox 360 controller did. But beyond that, TES3 has truly provided me with a way to escape from all of this misery for a while. True, any game might occupy time, but the more immersive a game is, the more you can let go of your earthly cares and concerns. When I fire up Morrowind and load my save, it's like I step through a door to a different place altogether, a place where I'm able to leave my pain, nausea, and fear behind for a while, or at least let them fade to the background while I worry about the cliff racers harassing my Telvanni/Morag Tong mage/assassin as she makes her way to her next mark. Everything about TES3 demands your attention, which is a godsend for someone who's attention is usually consumed by illness and the crap that comes along with it. I am truly thankful for the time and thoughtfulness committed to the game by the good people at Bethesda. I have some pretty serious pain meds these days, but nothing makes me feel better than spending as much time in Vvardenfell as my hands will let me!

Well, there's my little story, for now. I want to say thank you again to the folks who have taken time to wish me well. I will get better, but the time-frame my doctor gave me was roughly 3 - 5 years, and even then some of the damage may turn out to be permanent. We just won't know some of these things for a while. In the meantime, I am just doing my best from day to day. Besides the illness we have tons of financial issues piling up on us, and when I've done all I can there it's nice to escape from that as well!

One last note.... If you don't know much about Chronic Lyme Disease, I urge you to learn more. There are very few parts of North America and Europe that aren't affected by it, and with warmer winters like we've been seeing the ticks aren't going dormant like they're supposed to. In short, there will be plenty of opportunities to be exposed to Lyme-bearing ticks this coming spring, so be aware! I also urge you to watch the documentary Under Our Skin. It opened my eyes to Chronic Lyme Disease, even before my diagnosis. It's available on Netflix (streaming, not sure about DVD), or you can watch it http://www.hulu.com/watch/268761 with commercials. Learn about it, and perhaps you will be better prepared to help someone else one day, perhaps even yourself (though I sincerely hope not... I'd not wish this on my worst enemy).

Thanks for reading if you made it this far. I hope you are able to take something positive away from it.

Take good care, all,
veg