CHANGES IN LATITUDES, CHANGES IN ATTITUDES

If you’ve read my two previous posts and then wondered what happened to me, I apologize. I have a hard time talking about myself and especially about this topic. You see, I would really like to live in a state of denial where I’ll wake up tomorrow and everything, at least as far as my health goes will be fine. I know that’s not going to happen, but some of this is a little too ‘real’ for me.

Anyway…I’m back and going to continue. I’ll try to catch up to present day here in the next few posts.

The next physical trauma came when I noticed a hard lump in my forearm on the outside just below my elbow. I was painful if I tried to lean on my elbows and I started to become concerned. When I saw a friend who was an Orthopedic Surgeon, he said it was some sort of tumor and though it would be best to watch it for a few months. When I told him that I had cancer, he decided that it should be taken out right away.

This ‘tumor’ turned out to be the bursa from my elbow joint. Occasionally, for some reason they will become inflamed and slip outside the joint. It was not a tumor, but did need to be removed. It was day surgery and I recovered nicely with a week.

The next day I returned to see the orthopedic surgeon and he immediately whipped out a needle that was about four inches long attached to a very large syringe, which he proceeded to stick right into the swollen red spot on my arm. What he drew out was not a pretty sight. I was put on a super dose of antibiotics, while they cultured the infection.

It turned out to be Strep A, most likely contracted in the hospital (although the doctor would never admit that). I spent about a month on antibiotics and was again quite sick from then. It took me about another six months to recover from this most recent medical adventure.

After all of this, I spent the next two to three years trying to recover from this serious of physical trauma and the cancer treatment. I just wanted to be ‘normal’ again. OK, I know there is no such thing as normal, but before I was diagnosed with cancer I had my own level of normal and I wanted to go back to that. My oncologist kept telling me that this was an unrealistic expectation. After all I was a few years older and had been through a lot; again I was getting the ‘you’re lucky to be alive’.

As time passed I accepted some of the physical abnormalities as my ‘new normal’. Things like I was lucky if I slept four hours a night. I was walking around seriously sleep deprived, but really didn’t know it. I knew where every public bathroom within a hundred mile radius of my home was, because I never and I mean never went two hours without needing one. I had a fairly constant mild but nagging pain in my right leg and had to be careful, because the least bit of trauma would cause it to swell. My immune system was completely shot. If someone sneezed in the next county, I caught whatever virus they were spewing. And so on.

By the end of 2009 my husband’s business was in the dumper. The economic ‘slowdown’ (ha,ha,ha) hit our area and unfortunately, he tried to hang on a little too long. There really wasn’t much work in his field anywhere in the country, so we decided to leave. That’s when we moved to the USVI in the Caribbean. The packing up and selling of most of our belongings was emotionally traumatic. We were seriously in debt, with no means of digging out. That and the fact that we were leaving everyone that we loved behind took a bigger toll on me physically that I recognized.

Once we were settled in the Tropics, I actually began to feel a little bit better. At the very least denial was a whole lost easier to come by, being so far away from some of the problems. I still wasn’t sleeping, but I think the warm, moist weather did a lot for me. I also was able to spend a lot of time in the water; either the ocean or the pool at the complex where we lived. Unfortunately, my immune system still wasn’t functioning properly and I was now exposed to a whole new set of viruses and bacteria. I seemed to be constantly fighting some form of infection. This and the fact that during my three years in the Caribbean I was subject to some serious emotional upheaval most likely contributed to my auto immune disease.

After three years I relocated to the US in the High Sierra of Nevada. More on that in the next post.