CRIPPLING EVENTS

In my last post I brought you up to my move to Nevada, but after reading it over I found that I left out some very important information, so please bear with me while I backtrack.

During the three years that I lived in the Caribbean when the temperature hovers between 80 and 95 degrees Fahrenheit year round I had many times when I was cold. Cold like you can’t get warm cold. I had a friend there who was a doctor and he kept encouraging me to get my thyroid checked. He told me that anybody who was cold in the Caribbean had some sort of medical problem. I of course, laughed this off. I had had my thyroid checked numerous times in previous years and the tests always came back normal.

While still on island during one of my visits to the local clinic, I complained to the doctor of pain all over my body. He proceeded to conduct a very technical test. He pointed to various areas of my body and asked me if it hurt there. When I responded in the affirmative to over 90% of the places he pointed he told me I had Fibromyalgia. I was stunned. First, to receive this diagnosis. Second, at the method by which he came to it.

Of course, when I told my family they kind of gave me that look. When asked about the procedure of the diagnosis ‘the look’ became attitude. I have to admit that even I was pretty skeptical. I had several friends who had been diagnosed with Fibromyalgia and I was sure they had received more thorough testing in the States.

This is what started my research into Fibro. It didn’t take me look to realize that I had received the standard test for Fibro and how little was actually know about this disease. It seemed to me that this might just be the new ‘designer disease’. You know that one that all the fashionable ladies have and everyone talks about, but nobody has any definitive answer, treatment, or cure for.

To say that I felt discouraged about this would have been the understatement of the century. This and the problems with my right leg were really starting to get me down. I felt as though I was in constant physical and emotional pain. During this time I also had a Spiritual crisis of sorts. This isn’t something I want to get into on this blog, but I do want to mention it so as to paint the picture that I was not in a good place. I have a lot of faith, and even during the spiritual crisis, I was able to hold onto that with the knowledge that God and Jesus Christ love and care about me. I have no doubt that they know my name.

I don’t think I was ready to admit all of this at the time, but my decision to leave the island was largely based upon the fact that I knew I needed medical attention that I would not be able to receive there. It was difficult for me to leave, but I had wanted to live at Lake Tahoe since 2005 and decided that if I was leaving the ‘Blue Waters’ of the Caribbean I would be content to settle on the ‘Blue Watters’ of Lake Tahoe.

OK, now I’ve brought you up to the point when I came to live in Nevada. I should mention that the trip here was not easy. Over 22 hours from the time I left St. Croix until I landed in Reno, NV, four different flights and through five time zones. I was exhausted. My arrival in Reno was around midnight PST, but that was actually the early morning hours in the ATZ (Atlantic Time Zone-Caribbean). After spending the night in Reno and traveling up to Lake Tahoe to see the new apartment, I felt as though I could sleep for a month, and that’s about what I did.

I got to Tahoe on May 30^th and I thought I was going to freeze to death. I was constantly freezing. I forced myself to get in the local pool and work out, but I never did dip my body into the lake that first summer. Everyone was saying that it was cooler than normal, so I consoled myself with that knowledge and chalked it up to my body needing to acclimate. Fortunately, that cool summer turned into a mild winter, because I never did seem to acclimate and I was always cold and I mean shivering cold. The problems with my leg intensified and if I was going anywhere that I knew I had to walk long distances I started using a cane.

By the spring of 2014 I was resolved to being a cripple. I couldn’t walk very far, but walking was better than standing and sitting was the worst. Some days my arms, neck and shoulders hurt so bad it was impossible to lean back in a chair and even laying down was agony. I started having trouble with my hands. They hurt and wouldn’t work. Typing and therefore, writing became an arduous chore. I tried very hard to remain cheerful and hopeful that I would begin to get better, but could see no change in sight.

I don’t have health insurance. I don’t trust the medical community and I had pharmaceuticals. I firmly believed that it was trusting my doctors during my treatment for cancer that landed me in this predicament and therefore I was not ready to turn to them for help.

I have several friends who are also cancer survivors, interesting that they have all been diagnosed with Fibromyalgia. Everyone was on pain meds. I had a short bout with them, but decided that was not how I wanted to live. When the pain finally started to completely overcome me, I turned to research again. A friend suggested to me that I look into the possibility of an Iodine deficiency. While researching Iodine I was led to sites on Fibromyalgia and it's treatment. That is how I found the doctors at Power Health in Reno, Nevada that I am currently seeing.

 I’ll tell you all about that ‘new adventure’ in my next post.

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.

BE HAPPY YOU'RE ALIVE AND LEARN TO LIVE WITH IT

Just so you know; here at the beginning I’m going to be posting quite a bit, in the hope that I can catch myself up on everything that has led me to this diagnosis and treatment. I will try to keep the posts under 1,000 words, so it will be easier for you to read, and me to write.

Now that you know I had cancer and went through traditional treatment for it, let’s move onto the next trauma (both physical and emotional) in my life. During this time I was living on a ranch in Idaho and we were raising Quarter Horses. I have to tell you, those horses saved my sanity. I wasn’t able to do much, but anytime I could be outside playing with them was time I wasn’t thinking about my horrifying physical condition.

One sunny morning I decided to move one of the brood mares to a different pasture. Not thinking at all, I stepped through the gate with Eve following, I twisted my body to swing the gate shut and this directed Eve to back up. She backed right into the electric fence. Once she got the shock, she took off like a rocket, right over me.

I literally ‘saw stars’. I believe I was only out for a minute or two and when I came to, I was face down in the mud. Upon trying to get up, I realized I was hurt in several places. My left thigh, right in the quad muscle was on fire, I had a big knot on my forehead (don’t know for sure if I was kicked or hit a rock when I went down) and my right ankle really, Really, REALLY hurt. I hobbled my way back to the house, which was probably about a quarter mile away. When I got into the house and called for help, everyone wanted to know why I was covered in mud.

The result was a broken ankle. It seems the horse stepped on my left thigh and directly on the muscle in my right calf, causing so much torque on that muscle that it snapped the bone at the ankle. I was fortunate that it had not displaced, but was confined to a large non-weight bearing ‘boot’ for a minimum of six weeks and I had a mild concussion.

During this time on crutches, my leg began to swell. The orthopedic surgeon wasn’t too concerned until this swelling would not go down. My oncologist later told me that it was due to the removal of lymph nodes during my surgery, and the after-effects of radiation, followed by this trauma that now the lymph fluid on my lower right quadrant was not moving properly. The solution: Wear compression hose (essential when flying) and be happy you’re alive, and learn to live with it.

The breaking of my leg was trauma number two in a very short period of time. My current doctor is pretty convinced that this is what contributed to my Fibro and Auto Immune Disease. I have been plagued with recurring pain in my right leg ever since, but the general sensitivity and all-over pain did not commence until a few years later. More on that in the next post.