wizard level health management

Tossing this one over here. I probably put way too much of this stuff on Pinky blog.

The Good- I got boosted to moderator on my fave game server this weekend. 😍

The Bad- I think I've overshot my tolerance level for Nick Jr. Can't wait for snow days to stop happening.

The Ugly- Currently overlapping tamiflu and z-pack, doubling all my antihistamines (zyrtec- long acting H1, benadryl- short acting H1, pepcid- H2), requested inhaler, hopefully that gets filled tomorrow. Crazy weather changes and living in cedar/juniper country brought a pollen burst upon all the flu/crud/cold suffering in my area and there are alerts going around now about asthma can kill in these conditions. Lungs are clear but bronchials squirting like lawn sprinklers reacting to the pollen and I'm racing to stay ahead of all the wet in there, crossing my fingers I don't wind up on pred. Can't take cough meds, so I'm doing what I can not to cough, but the resulting upper torso fibro flare is real and today was charley horse hell around my entire ribcage for awhile, literally couldn't move for about an hour and just stood around attempting to stretch some of it out without triggering it worse. Ear pain has reached suckage level. Throat feels punched. Eye slime is starting to dry up, so that's a good sign. Thrilled I never once developed a fever while influenza B was active in my household.

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Tomorrow I make two trips into town, which means 80 miles of driving. Really hoping Wed and Thurs are real days off for me. I desperately need to decrust my kitchen floor and reclaim a few surfaces. Have started spring/summer planning aka it's time to watch the super sales and replace clothes wearing out. I'm still in a lot of the clothes I got before Bunny was conceived, which means most of it is over 5 years old, and as frugal as I am, I've been wondering for several months now how a particular pair of jeans hasn't poofed away like dust.

Pain management needs to happen, but I'll be taking it much slower this year. Neuro said I could double gabapentin as needed since it's a baby dose (does NOT work like tylenol or ibuprofen or opioids), but we all know I won't just sporadically do that on whims after what happened last year when he tripled my dose and I had to cut that back down. I'll be touching base with the arm/hand surgeon in March, hoping to wind back up in occupational therapy on arms for another try. Of all the things I've been assessed for, no one has actually looked at arthritis in shoulder, so this could get stupidly painful in therapy. I'm keeping range of motion ok, but losing strength and grip through the range of motion, and the pain is referring like crazy last few months. Will also be assessing feet around that time, although neuro says indication is arthritis coming on in hip joint and referring to feet. This is on top of neuropathies I've had for years from injury and flares, so I'm wrapping my head around getting a controlled burn/crash plan in place for the rest of my aging. Totally dreading going back on full meds. Most of the time I'm too busy to think about this stuff, but experience keeps tapping me for attention and reminding that putting it off too long will mean more work getting control over it later.

Have to stay healthy! I breezed through gallbladder removal recovery and a house full of flu victims last 4 months, so it's actually pretty exciting that I have gotten such good control over my health planning that I'm not the one dragging everyone else down for a change. Water, proteins, raw veg, good sleep, and taking the time to move around and keep up my stretches and nerve glosses, was even able to start walking a bit again this month. Keeping the allergens down in a house full of people has been challenging but I'm a washaholic with anything laundry, Scott compulsively vacuums, and we have HEPA air purifiers in several rooms. I know my CPAP has made a huge difference since I breathe through more filters in my sleep. Pre and probiotics are a big deal, too. Healthy gut, healthy body. As long as I control my glucose levels and keep up all the rest, I can take fewer pills, less impact on my liver and kidneys, faster healing, and now I've leveled up to fewer actual sick days for the first time in a decade, and that's with a small child bringing every germ from school into the house. I worked really hard getting here.

What is tiny and green and hurting all over?

I've been blogging most of the daily/weekly stuff on #pinkyblog, but since this one is 99% medical, it's going here.

I've had gallstones come and go for decades, sometimes they would just magically dissolve and then come back.  I guess thank goodness for being autism spectrum with a fibro nerve disorder, because I was done dealing with the pain long before a rupture, even though I've been putting up with gallstone problems most of my life. I've regularly passed them, very used to that kind of pain, but this year was really different. I felt short of breath and heart racy with the least exertion that got worse over time, and the worst of the pain referred left, so I was checked for everything imaginable, including pancreatitis and aneurysm. I've seen the pathology report after surgery. I got lucky, my gallbladder wall was only .2 cm even after months of being chronic. My mucosa was still intact, but I was a ticking time bomb this year jammed so full of little rocks and scattered particles inflaming the hell outa the surrounding area.

From the abstract The degree of gallbladder wall thickness and its impact on outcomes after laparoscopic cholecystectomy.
"A greater degree of gallbladder wall thickness is associated with an increased risk of conversion, increased postoperative complications, and longer lengths of stay. Classifying patients according to degree of gallbladder wall thickness gives more accurate assessment of the risk of surgery, as well as potential outcomes."

I honestly cannot even imagine reaching the point of rupture. So many horror stories are coming at me now from all directions about complications that I'm wondering how some of you or your loved ones are still alive. One doctor once called me a canary in a coal mine, aware of my internal environment long before other people normally are, and another told me I'd probably outlive everyone I know just because I can feel every little thing inside me making me a nervous wreck.

Since I've lived with autoimmune flares and resulting treatment wreaking havoc on my immune system, I have a very healthy fear of infection going out of control. I'm not easy to treat because med intolerant, so I confine myself to what others fondly refer to as my bubble world. I still go out and run errands, but I'm super cautious about not ever letting anything touch my face until I get home and wash my hands really good. I've had allergic reactions to simply absentmindedly scratching my lip, and I pick up germs so fast just touching things that I'm usually the only one sick. I've mentioned picking up hand-foot-mouth just from resting my arms and hands on chair handles in a waiting room and not being mindful of touching my hands to my face. I had no other contact with anyone besides my husband for the two weeks prior, and he never got it.

One of my biggest fears is CMV reactivation, because I've been living with a liver condition most of my adult life and possibly even my entire life back to around 11 years old. I had a discussion with a liver specialist one year about aggressive mega supplementation for long periods that I was subjugated to as a child, and it's very possible my stomach bloat and belly pain goes back that far. My liver was already sensitive when I started drinking in my mid 20s and I'm pretty sure I went through liver toxicity after sudden alcohol withrawal about a year and a half later. I've been watched for liver tumors after a ten year stint with lupus meds, and then had a few discussions about autoimmune liver disease after initial CMV infection swelled me up for months, which could actually kill me very quickly if that ever happens. The last thing I want to do with my health is make life harder on my liver.

Most people don't even think about their livers and don't know they live with stenosis for years. I've been very aware since my late 20s because my liver almost never stops sending out referred pain signals, and apparently was able to feel the imminent explosion coming on. I can't tell you what a relief the surgery was after months of pain referring, and after the horror stories I'm hearing from friends and loved ones now about their own and others' experiences with gallbladder emergencies, I'm point blank saying stop blowing yours off before it gets to the point where your life STOPS for immediate emergency rescue after a rupture. That level of inflammation and infection isn't easy to get over and recover from once that happens. That ticking time bomb is snuggled right next to an organ you absolutely cannot live without.

Save the liver! I saw when this original skit first aired. If you cannot view this 3rd party embed, you can see Dan Akroyd's French Chef skit -here-.

I just discovered someone has autotuned Julia Child. 😂

middle of the night chronic spoonie lurker jackpot

Pix click out to other sites and sources. Some amusingly have nothing to do with what we're talking about.

I was very ill for about a year before I finally felt desperate enough to seek out medical help. I'd lost 75 pounds and hurt profusely all over, and felt like my spine was being microwaved, as if the spinal cord must have a fever. My first doctor was an ancient country doctor on the brink of retirement. My bloodwork inspired him to let me know I would be in a nursing home by 40, and that there was nothing that could be done. Then he prescribed the biggest jar of aspirin I ever saw in my life and told me to take it every day. About a couple of weeks into the aspirin I went through a full week of hallucinating and 'visions' and should probably have been in a hospital. I never went back to that doctor, and stopped the aspirin. I was in my mid 20s.

A few months after that I dragged myself into a city clinic and saw a real rheumatologist. He asked why I was there. I told him I thought I might have lupus. He asked me ten questions, and I said yes to all ten, including losing my hair, which was noticeable to my family. Without ordering a single blood test, he laughed and told me I don't look sick, and said I was skipping down a rosy little path to a psychiatric illness. I dragged back out to my car and sat there crying for almost an hour. Note- several years later, a doctor sent me back to that same rheumatologist who was now in an even bigger clinic, and after touching my rock hard shoulders exclaimed that I had the worst fibromayalgia he'd ever seen and demanded to know why I wasn't being treated for it.

I was too devastated to try again for another year, until I finally couldn't take it any more. It was a horrible time for single parents on medicaid, no clinic I called would take me. I finally drove back to the city to a clinic I hadn't called yet and dragged from office to office asking if someone could please see me. Finally, on the third floor, one doctor said yes and saw me that day.

From Fibromyalgia- University of Maryland Medical Center
"Fibromyalgia can be difficult to diagnose. It can take 5 years for the average person with the condition to finally get a diagnosis. As many as three out of every four people with fibromyalgia remain undiagnosed."
I was fast tracked to rheum and diagnosed within a week.

From Do I have lupus or fibromyalgia?- Fibromyalgia Information Foundation
"As many of the symptoms of fibromyalgia are similar to those experienced by lupus patients, there is a natural concern that the symptoms of a fibromyalgia flare could be the underlying lupus picking up steam. Ultimately, the treating physician has to make a call on these increased symptoms. In general, lupus patients who are undergoing a flare have other findings; such as evidence of true arthritis (usually with joint swelling), skin rashes, sores in their mouth, fever, hair fall or evidence of specific organ disease such as pleurisy or microscopic amounts of blood and protein in the urine. Furthermore, in active lupus, blood tests such as the sedimentation rate often become elevated, the white count (particularly the lymphocyte subset) becomes depressed and there is often an increase in the level of anti-DNA antibodies. None of these findings are a feature of fibromyalgia -- thus the distinction between a flare of fibromyalgia and a flare of lupus should not be too difficult if the problem is approached systematically."
I was also dx'd simultaneously and treated immediately for lupus based on positive ANA and high SEDs which refused to come down for several years even on meds. Medicaid wasn't paying for a new drug called Ansaid, so my doctor kept me on samples for five months. I credit him with saving my life. He also dx'd me with Hashimoto's (autoimmune thyroid) about a year later, based on radioactive iodine uptake.

My SEDs hovered between 75 and 100 for several years. I felt like my bones had been crushed and nothing touched the pain, but the Ansaid kept me functioning enough to work on my college degree.

In the years since, photosensitivity called polymorphic light eruption (PLE) was confirmed by a dermatologist, a liver condition called NASH was confirmed by an endocrinologist, and I underwent heart surgery at 38 to correct a rhythm problem that started in high school after I had measles, which I just lived with until it became unbearable. During my worst year I went through nerve fail which caused such severe dry eye (I still make only 3% moisture in one eye, confirmed by an opthamolagist) and dry mouth that I developed cavities all over my mouth. My dentist was thrilled when the moisture finally came back on, and I have had only one cavity in the years since.

I'm also positive for lyme, esptein-barr, bartonella, and CMV, plus I had the measles in high school. What doesn't kill you doesn't always make you stronger. Sometimes it makes you a puny sickie.

Why am I saying all this? Because I still have doctors asking Are you sure it's lupus? (Yeah, they're asking me.) I've never been hospitalized and managed to fake my way through 15 months on a desk job (my last job after years of more laborious jobs) without missing a day before I finally fell apart because when I was growing up, we never went to doctors. I grew up on a farm working like a dog since I was very young, pushing animals 4-8 times my size around regularly, and using my hands so hard that I'd developed carpal tunnel by the time I was in high school (recently confirmed as 'severe' by a neurologist). Then I went on to survive being thrown out of a car crash without any pain meds at all. After living with nasty trigeminal pain from damage for years, a neurologist finally dx'd me with trigeminal neuralgia.

I've come through a whole lot of thick and thin, have been through several epic health crashes, but what started turning it all around was 1- finally being dx'd with diabetes and changing my diet, and 2- slowly weaning off the handfuls of meds that kept me 'drunk' for years. AFTER THESE TWO THINGS, my liver tests finally went back into a normal range. I had elevated liver enzymes for two decades until I changed those two things. One year my liver was so sick that my doctor wanted to test me for autoimmune liver disease, but I felt too rotten to go through a long needle penetration. I still get symptoms once in awhile, so maybe I do, but it sucks so I avoid flaring it as much as possible.

Ever since I made these changes, which have taken several years (four years since the diet changes, seven years since I first started weaning off meds one by one under doctor supervision), my health has slowly but steadily improved. I have come back from being convinced death was close (using a cane and sometimes a transport chair and daily advair just to be able to breathe, and needing help dressing and bathing), to living a pretty normal life in my own home now. I still have mini flares, I still get SED spikes once in awhile, but for the most part nearly everything in my body is improving as I age after years of immobility and misery.

I still look around for tips and advice from other spoonies on rough weeks, and what I call my rough weeks are still spectacularly rough compared to non-spoonies, but to me now, they're a vast improvement over rough years.

I wrote this down in one place to give other people hope. There really is hope.

If you are a very sick and puny person and are still drinking soda pop and smoking cigarettes, you cannot get better until you stop that.

If you are a fatigued scatterbrain who enjoys a little too much pasta and dessert, you cannot get more energy until you stop that.

If you are overworked and eating salads and and torturing yourself to 'be healthy', you cannot feel healthy until you stop that. Get some real rest and more protein in your diet.

If you are buying extra makeup and putting more chemicals in your hair trying not to look bad, stop that and take a step back- do a real self assessment, prioritize some goals, make a PLAN, and spend the next 2-5 years implementing. It took you years to go to pot, it'll take a few years to come back from that.

I am a workaholic. I'm also an alcoholic (20 years dry now), a very heavy smoker (3 packs a day, 25 years off now), a codeine-benzo-caffeine addict (never cold turkey off benzos, guys, it sucks and it's dangerous, and guess how I know that), a chocoholic (a severe nut allergy popping up cures that real quick, read a few labels and laugh with me about how most of the chocolate in the world is processed in facilities also processing nuts), a sweets junkie (I'm an artist with decadent baking), ok you get the point. All that stuff piles up. And once you've overloaded, it takes years to undo damage to your immune system, your liver and kidneys, your eyes, even your brain. You can't take ginseng and improve your brain power and still do all this stuff.

There are people out there who do everything right and don't get better. Hugs to you guys, I've watched a few friends go down and I know it's really hard. There are other people out there who do everything wrong and live long lives without ever getting sick or cancer. High five on you guys, good on your magic DNA. Trade me bodies sometime. And don't gloat or feel better than other people because we all know it was the luck of the draw, and it's not like you got to pick your body before you were born.

It's not your fault. Yes, we have science and medicine now, yes, you know better than to be ingesting things and not exercising and whatnot, but just because we know this stuff doesn't mean it's your fault. 300 years ago, people died all the time and no one knew why (unless it was murder or some crazy accident). Now we know why, and basically it really is the luck of the draw- you are stuck with the DNA you were born with. Some people are prone to cancers, some prone to diabetes, some prone to autoimmune problems, whatever. You were born that way.

True story. My husband's granny lived to 102 with full blown diabetes. She avoided stuff that spiked her blood sugar. Her daughter (my husband's mother) eats bags of candy and to this day in her 80s remains completely free of diabetes. Eating sugar doesn't cause diabetes, but it will make you very sick if you have diabetes. My husband has been hovering on the brink of 'pre-diabetes' (that's such a joke, just call it what it is) for years because he's a hard worker and manages to keep his fasting glucose low enough to keep the doctor hesitating, even though he carb loads like crazy sometimes. When he does that, his heart races, and we know there is some damage going on at the cellular level, but he thinks he can get away with cheating. He's never yet been treated and he doesn't count carbs, he just works really hard.

On the other hand, I come from everyone going diabetic on my mom's side, lots of strokes and vascular disease kind of stuff, and she didn't make it to 70. I watched diabetes destroy her. She suddenly started wasting away and I thought she had cancer. She said she never felt better in her life. I don't know if that was true, because I also know her feet started going numb, and it took her months to recover properly after a simple gall bladder surgery.

I was going down way faster than my mom. Way faster. Now I'm doing much better at this age than she did. Way better.

I just want to let you guys know there really is hope, but you are the one who has to decide whether to make it possible. Whatever your diagnosis, whether they're missing something or not, even if it feels dire, you can make decisions that change how you feel down the road. Where do you want to be in five years? Make a list. Fewer headaches, maybe. Heartburn gone for good. Bladder control. Less brain fog. A little more energy. You might surprise yourself if you make a decision and stick to it. Just 5 years ago I was using a motor cart to buy groceries. Now I trot all over Walmart.

Little steps over several years add up to really big changes.

controlled crash- holiday spoonie

It's been years since I've gotten through the Christmas season without being in some level of flare up. I usually get validation in the form of a speckled ANA and 80-90 SED in January or February and wind up on prednisone for a week to knock it back down. I've been doing this so long that I can feel about where I'm at day to day, and in order to avoid an ER trip at Christmas over a solid face plant from doing way too much, I have learned to readjust my days accordingly, slowing down more or letting go of something on the list, until I'm nearly down to a crawl, but still functioning.

I've spent a few Christmases completely nonfunctional and unable to even smile and get dressed without being a huge drag on everyone, so it was easier to hide in my house and cry and try to sleep through everything I was missing. I felt too ill to get into a car to go lay on someone else's couch, and I couldn't be nice on the phone if someone was handing me a million dollars. It's very hard to juggle all the extra social expectations on top of the extra demanding physical expectations the holidays bring. Yes, I've done it all- parent president of high school marching band, a variety of fundraisers, as much school support as I could handle while still working, and eventually had to bail on this and that until I was finally just missing everything. I followed all my doctors' instructions, including handfuls of pills, but nothing replaces rest, nutrition, and common sense. During holidays, all three of those fly right out the window.

Most of surviving holidays in flare up is about balance. People think they have to fulfill social obligations. I realized over time that other people would be shocked if they were asked to be supportive of social obligations if it meant risking their lives. Every time I go into flare up, I am risking my life when I do too much and start crashing. I have lived for years with flare ups, and they don't necessarily kill a person outright, but they do cause harm in the form of wear and tear on tissues, and a person must spend quality time rebuilding that shredded tissue if they want to live a good life. Inflammation from a flare up is hard on blood vessels, the lymph system, major organs (especially kidneys and eyes), and can affect the brain to the point of making terrible mistakes in traffic, and we all know how immediately life threatening that is.

Several big things happen in our bodies to keep our balance. Hormones regulate everything 24/7, special organs continually assess chemical and nutrient levels and send reports to the brain, and the constant feedback is how we stay in a good rhythm every day. We sleep, get up, eat, get busy, eat some more, enjoy something, and go back to sleep. When we get out of rhythm we don't feel well and get jet lagged and cranky. People who live with chronic illness of any kind get bumped out of rhythm very easily, the reports to the brain get a little frantic, the brain reacts with attempts to adjust this and adjust that, but when something isn't working very well to begin with, all kinds readjustment attempts can bump into each other, cascade into a mess, and then snowball out of control. Hormones and chemical levels on blood work look more like a first year programmer failing an exam than an experienced machine that evolved over millennia.

Someone with lupus and diabetes, like me, might feel really good one day. It's the holidays! This is fun! We go on an extra shopping trip, miss a meal, grab food on the fly, stay up late with friends, don't sleep well, feel gross and eat all wrong the next day, push ourselves to keep up, shove extra coffee into our systems, take extra pain pills, and before you know it, a couple of weeks of mistakes have crescendoed into the nasty realization that we are way off course and the only way to fix what's happening in our bodies is to stop everything right now and get back on track, or even get emergency medical intervention. Being exposed to flu or strep on top of all this can result in hospitalization for some spoonies. What a dismal way to spend Christmas.

I have learned to do a 'controlled burn' and a 'controlled crash'.

A controlled burn is like knowing you're going to wreck your day, so you pack for contingencies. I take a lunch box with my own food when I go shopping. I limit myself to only so many hours of activity and then GO HOME. I've noticed 4 hours is about my max, and assume the rest of the day is screwed, I don't try to cook or clean after I get home. If I'm stuck in and out of a car longer than 6 hours, I know I'm going to crash hard so I pre-plan my medication safety net. The key to pills is knowing they do not fix anything and don't give me super powers. They are a bandaid meant to transport me more comfortably to the end of my day, they are not meant to 'cure' or make my problems nonexistent. I have dearly paid for abusing medication to keep stubbornly plowing through life, and I'm on full disability now. I would have been smarter to let go of a few things on my list.

A controlled crash is more of a long-term plan. My holiday stress starts in November and goes for at least 8 weeks through New Year's. After that I'm pretty much in crisis and need intervention. If there were no holidays, the changing weather alone would still impact my life, so I can't just blame holidays. But because there are holidays, I know I'm going to destroy myself, and I know it could get really expensive and depressing to clean all the mess up with doctors and then being stuck at home. So since I know this, I can control just how messy it gets. I can keep plowing stubbornly through, or I can map out a plan with contingencies and loop counters for smaller fails. I can let go of lots of little things and make executive decisions to control my blood sugar and my fatigue level, or I can cast my cares to the wind and spelunk straight into hellish misery and subsequent regret.

We hear people addressing depression and self harm in the form of cutting and whatnot, but we don't hear a lot about depression and freaking ourselves out with blood sugar spikes in the 300s when we reach for the comfort food other people take for granted. And then, if we have autoimmune responses, the inflammation that a glucose spike causes can trigger a flare up, and here it comes, the joint pain, the aching all over, the nasty headache, the difficulty moving around and sleeping and keeping up. And then comes the regret or self pity while our brain chemicals freak out and depression knocks us flat. And then comes over medicating or drinking, waking up with either way too high or way too low glucose levels but we're too depressed and late for work to check, and then comes a nasty morning traffic accident. I know of two morning traffic deaths in the last year directly related to blood sugar levels, both of which left orphaned kids behind. That was NOT a controlled crash. Yeah, now you see what I mean by controlled crash.

Everybody's got something at Christmas. Some people have cancer, some have funerals to go to, some are homeless, whatever. It's normal to go through depression at holidays and feel bad, but we must realize that sooner or later, everyone goes through a really bad Christmas. Or several. My mom was airlifted to a hospital on Christmas day one year. One of my children was in a hospital several hundred miles away on another Christmas having emergency surgery. Other Christmases I've been too ill to shop or wrap presents. So before we start our controlled crash and burn plans, the first thing we must embrace is that part of the PLAN is to plan on depression. Allow time outs for depression.

Normal up and down depression is nature's way of telling us we need to slow down because we're doing too much and then kicking ourselves for not keeping up. Stop that! Plan out a picnic for your depression. Make it a regular date thing. Don't shove it off and pop a pain pill when you've got time to waste a couple of hours. Let go of the world and crash on your couch. A lot of little crashes beats a nasty big one every single time. I have noticed over a couple of years that allowing for normal depression swings has a very positive impact on my more severe clinical depression. Depression, for me, is a lifestyle, so I include that in my self care plan. The key to this working is to let go of all guilt. Guilt is a control mechanism that people and society use to force behaviors. I would never dream of making someone feel guilty if they didn't play the Christmas game right, because I can imagine them crying later if I ran over their feelings and forced mine on them. We see it happen all the time. We also think Christmas day is THE DAY to be with family. What about the other 364 days? Doi. That kind of thinking isn't worth your health, capiche? We love each other every day all year long. Let go of that silly guilt. Enjoy a couple of hours of down time.

-*-*-Side note to caretakers- I know you don't get down time. I was DPA for years for my disabled mother, and my sister raised a terminal child. Find a way to do nice things for yourself. It's ok to ask other people to help you do a controlled crash and burn once in awhile.-*-*-

The next thing to embrace in a controlled crash and burn is forgiveness. If you think something has to be perfect, imagine falling and getting a concussion and not being able to finish making something perfect. Was it worth it? I'm here to tell you nothing brings reality home like a good set of stitches with lots of blood soaking everything. If you think something can't get done without you, imagine this is the year you shock all your friends being the youngest person they know having a heart attack. The world won't stop just because you do. Stuff gets done whether it's you doing it or not. Want to be around to see it get done? TAKE A BREAK. And eat something healthy with magnesium in it. Magnesium deficiency is one of the first things they check for when they do ER tests for possible heart attack. Ask me how I know this. Forgive yourself for not being superman or superwoman, forgive others for not reaching your expectations, and chillax. Just because you didn't die yesterday stressing out doesn't mean you won't have a stroke today over the very same thing. My mom had hundreds of TIAs before the big strokes started. She was right side deficit for years from stress and uncontrolled diabetes.

The next thing to embrace for controlled crash and burn is limits. Set reasonable time limits, glucose level limits, activity limits, and stick to them. I don't know about you guys, but I find it really embarrassing to wind up in an ER on holidays. I feel like I'm ruining other people's Christmas and stressing them out more and I really don't like the extra attention. That alone is usually motivation enough for me to stay on track well enough not to super crash. I've never been hospitalized, even with all my stuff, which seems to amaze a few people. I grew up very independent, raised by a father who still doesn't believe in doctors, and people who see me going to doctors all the time without knowing my history don't have a clue how difficult it is for me to get out of my house and keep trying to find ways to solve my problems with medical intervention. I feel like a guinea pig, I've hated all the tests I've had to go through, I loathe the fear (I usually have to be sedated for a simple MRI), BUT I am very very good at living with autoimmune flare ups and diabetes because I know how everything in my body works. I've known too many people who shrugged odd pain or feelings off and found out later they were in advanced stages of cancer or having severe diabetes complications or suddenly having heart attacks that nearly killed them.

One of the best inventions on the planet is a little tiny flip spiral. You can buy those in packs. Every day I flip to a clean page, put the date at the top, and then write the time when I do glucose or blood pressure checks and every pill I take. Make it a habit. It very quickly becomes second nature, and then you start noticing things. Maybe those two pills shouldn't be taken together. Maybe glucose readings are better at certain times of day. Maybe that headache or anxiety attack or cranky feeling you get starts showing up about the same time every day, and you notice it seems to be happening within so long of certain meals or activities. Or every single weekend. Once you notice a pattern, you can control the pattern. It's very liberating not feeling hostage to chaotic cosmic whim, life going out of control again, freaking out in the wee hours over something. It's very empowering to experiment with data and results over time.

Hence, a huge part of my controlled crash is data entry in a tiny flip spiral. I can tell you that I've missed taking my thyroid pill two days in a row only twice in so many years and both times I was extremely miserable. That alone snowballed several days into a ridiculous debacle, because thyroid has huge impacts on sex hormones, blood pressure, and diabetes. The headaches were out of this world, my heart thumped real hard, and the fatigue crash was pretty scary, not even going to mention menopause symptoms going off the rails. Yeah, two days was all it took for me. And I know this definitively because if a pill is missing in the spiral, I didn't take it. This has been a crucial strategy for me because I had significant brain fail for several years and my short term memory was a joke. I could have caused myself serious harm taking my pills wrong, and many people do. Medical mistakes are more common than you think. Not all prescription pill deaths are Hollywood actors overdosing. Click this if you think I'm being too dramatic. Prescription Drug Overdose in the United States Yeah, don't want that kind of crash and burn, either. You're seeing more and more why I'm calling my way a 'controlled' crash and burn.

I use my little spiral to help me set limits. If I can see cause and consequence patterns, I can control outcomes. If I can see that my fasting blood sugar is over 100, I know better than to eat sweets for breakfast, which starts the cascade for a really bad day with a nasty headache later and feeling sluggish through the afternoon, grabbing more junk and coffee, and then not being able to sleep, which in turn starts the next day off negatively before I even get started. If I have several rough days in a row going off track, I know it'll take a couple more days to get control back, and if I feel a flare up coming on, I know I need to rearrange my schedule for the week or wind up going out of control and calling my doctor. I can glance back through my little spirals and easily spot the days and weeks that went out of control.

I live on this edge in my body every single day, where things can go out of control real fast. I plan my life meticulously. That sounds like a drag, but it's actually pretty easy when I follow a few little guidelines I've made for myself. Take breaks, set limits, forgive myself, and pay attention to what I'm doing to myself. The easiest way I have found to control the cascade is to count my carbs in the first place, faithfully take my thyroid pill, and assume I'll need breaks even if I think I'm feeling fantastic. For the most part this has worked really well, but I still make some pretty big mistakes.

So a couple of days ago I made eggnog. I know I have to stop at 1/2 a cup and no more for at least an hour, preferably two hours. I wasn't feeling well because I had overdone, my brain fell out, and without even thinking I drank 2 cups of eggnog within an hour and popped my one pain pill for the day (doctor ordered anti inflammatory), then fell asleep on the couch. An hour later I woke up in crisis, disoriented, brutishly nasty headache, blood pressure spiking 187/112, weird things happening like one of my arms being ice cold with nasty spiky nerve pain shooting out my blanched white fingertips while the other arm was hot and my hand was bright red like I had been badly sunburned. My pulse was fine and my arms worked fine, so this was more like a nervous system reaction to something, but it clearly didn't seem to be any kind of allergic reaction. I finally thought to check my blood sugar and couldn't believe how high it still was fours hours after the eggnog (I usually go back into the 90s within 2 hours, so I must've gone really high),so I didn't eat the rest of the day. I'm guessing the glucose spike triggered an autoimmune reaction in my nervous system. This is not a new thing with me. Two days of severe headache and other nerve pain later, I'm kind of feeling ok again but dragging like I ran a marathon. All because I drank some eggnog two days ago.

The rest of my Christmas holiday absolutely must be revised now to a more tightly controlled crash. I feel like I'm in flare up now, my energy level is almost nonexistent, and it's up to me to get my team (family) in on not letting me hit the wall now before Christmas. No extra surprise favors from gramma on top of what I've already mapped out, no more exciting hustle and bustle, the plan now is to coast and stay on track with small meals and lots of rest. NO GUILT.

It's easy to forget all this when I'm feeling pretty good. It's easy for my family to forget all this when they see me feeling pretty good. But I've been kinda cranky lately, which is my typical warning sign that epic fail is ahead. I have to remove myself from the game board immediately. I did pretty good this year getting stuff done up to this point, and I'm going to focus on that and not moan about what I didn't get done. Getting 'done' with stuff before holidays isn't worth risking our lives. Capiche?

I've had years of practice. It never gets easier. It never stops being scary. But at least it's not hopeless any more. It's no longer a crazy scary scream ride that I'm clinging wild eyed through. It's more like a merry go round I can step off of and watch from the sides. I don't have to feel sad about it, because I've learned I can still enjoy it while I take a break. I don't have to be involved to enjoy the holiday. I can be glad I'm still here to see it happen.

That, my friends, is a controlled crash and burn. It is my Christmas gift to you if it's still a big crazy ride for you and you are alone screaming through the night on the internet looking for answers and feeling like your Christmas is spiraling in flames. Take a deep breath and put 'tiny flip spiral' on your shopping list. You're about to change your life.

If you're still in the mood to keep reading, I found this forum convo very helpful.

Is Having Blood Sugar in the 400's Dangerous?

This one is more techy.

Lupus and Diabetes
"People with lupus or diabetes – or both – can improve overall health and relieve a number of symptoms just by making healthy choices. A plant-based diet with lots of vegetables, legumes, and plant oils is critical. Adequate rest is also important. And exercise is crucial, both to control weight and insulin levels and to increase energy and improve mood. A healthy diet and a commitment to a treatment plan will strengthen the body and help the immune system return to a state of balance – and will make the treatment plan itself more effective."

One more thing- I can't repeat enough what a difference getting more protein in my diet has done for my overall physical and emotional health. Your tissues cannot heal properly without adequate protein and you will always feel 'off'. Pills can't fix that.

Get that spiral!!! Good luck.

a plan that works- spoonie survivalist

Yowza, back to start another round of physical therapy yesterday. Ideally, lower back core strength would be pool work, but being around the pool sets off asthma (chemicals?) and winds up counterproductive. I started out that way in 2008 and loved it, but breathing kind of takes precedence.

So yesterday it was back to balance workouts, and then deep tissue ASTYM, which I think actually gets more work done in half the time anyway because it pinpoints and concentrates on problem areas instead of continuing to use general overcompensation while strength training. I work with weights, balls, stretchy bands, and sometimes foam pads that force me to fine tune balance even more.

I am usually the youngest person I see in physical therapy, unless someone else has come in for athletic or accident related injury. Most of the work is older people trying to regain mobility and lower their pain levels. Since I've already been through nearly complete immobility and screaming high pain levels, I have a lot of empathy for them being old on top of it.

I was told by the very first doctor I saw in my mid-20's that I would be living in a nursing home by the time I was 40. Back then, before 'fibrositis' was a thing (now fibromyalgia), it wasn't that uncommon for people to wind up in severe contractures as they grew older, to the point of great suffering and losing ability to care for themselves. One of the focuses we learned in nursing school was how to care plan around patients with contractures. I saw very clearly where I was headed if I didn't get a handle on living with severe fibromyalgia complicated with autoimmune flare ups. Having diabetes with it makes it monumentally worse because ketones further slow down vital nutrient flow through the muscles. I watched my mother disintegrate into 'frozen shoulders' and severe physical and cognitive deficits before she finally died in a nursing home. If everything I'm going through is genetically inclined, I know exactly how it's all going to end.

click this for cute story

But not if I can help it! There is so much new knowledge nowadays. In 2008 I made the decision to taper off medications that didn't improve my quality of life in either function or pain control, and now I'm nearly free of meds. I put together a care team of my own that included my regular doctor (who refers me as needed to pulmonologist, rheumatologist, cardioloist, ENT, allergist, etc), psychologist, and chiropractor. I coordinated all this with my endocrinologist and gynocologist. It helps being in a system like Mercy that is software integrating all my medical info, but I started this self integration before they had that technology in place. It takes some effort and focus, but taking that first step to become my own health care advocate was the beginning of me changing my life. I know a lot of people who still have unsynchronized medical charts between widely disparate clinics and doctor groups, and I can see how this hampers the help they hope to get, especially if they're not very good yet at communicating to every doctor they see. My psychologist helped me learn to communicate my needs and goals to my doctors, and that made a lot of difference.

Disability is an unfortunate part of my life, and I resisted for years. I hid my problems as best I could until I quite literally could no longer function and started making big mistakes at work. It felt like my body and mind were closing down and I was trapped inside, and everything got really hard. It was hard to move around, hard to interact in social settings, hard to think. I even discussed becoming a nondriver with my doctor. My driving got pretty scary.

funny pix when u click

Fortunately, I discovered that Medicare has strong physical therapy support and encourages people to use their yearly programs that are designed to channel the patient's needs through one-on-one assessment and training. I couldn't see how this could help at first, but a new wave has been sweeping the country- ASTYM is all the rage now. I am one of the first in my area to go through comprehensive ASTYM therapy along with core strength training with several different therapists because I'm stubborn and want to get healthy. Because I accept that 1- I must work for this, 2- pain is ok and not to be avoided (many people stop because the pain doesn't stop right away), and 3- it really is up to ME being persistent to properly heal, I have regained not only a world of mobility I had lost for years, but also the strength and endurance to keep moving. I am able to do things again that I held no hope for in my future, and much of it with drastically reduced pain levels.

I still have rough days, weeks, even months, but I know now that I don't have to backslide to darkness and despair. It's up to me to be a vital person. It's my choice to work hard so that I can continue to be useful in this life. It took quite a lot of grit with no promise to cling to when I first started out. It's been 6 years since I began my first physical therapy. I've been able to avoid several spinal surgeries, many cortisone shots, and have probably reduced my fall risk by at least 80%. I'm not pain free and probably never will be, and every time I take a break from physical therapy the old stuff tries to creep back up on me. This isn't a cure. But it has become a lifestyle, and I'm grateful that I stuck through it this long because I'm reaching a place where life feels better, I feel happier, and I actually have hope for my future now.

I'm writing all this down because I remember how I used to search through the night for other people like me- how does one survive? How does one get through this hard stuff? How does one hang on when everything utterly sucks and life looks so sad? Especially in the wee hours of the night when there is no one to talk to.

I am drawing a road map. I'm finding my way through this jungle, and one day I'm going to make it easy for all of us to follow the map. In the meantime, this is me checking in on another prednisone taper and another round of physical therapy.

lol

a day in the life

These are highlights. This is how blogging has helped me get through the 'brain crash', which happened in 2004 during Bell's Palsy (which is totally nontypical but may be related to being a carrier, as we shall see) and grew increasingly worse until it started getting better around 2012-13, and is still improving. Between the confusion of brain fog and memory deficit (which was a new thing to my eidetic memory), I was unable to keep things straight for a long time. Being able to go back through private blogs not only helps me remember stuff, but why I made decisions this way or that. Blogging made it possible for me to watch my progress through a plan to get healthy again, physically and mentally. It's been nearly ten years since the brain crash (first signs in Sept 2004, but puzzling because no visible signs of stroke, tumor, illness, or trauma.) Life still goes on. I'm so glad I kept a daily log because I honestly don't remember most of this until it is triggered by reading it back to myself, then I go Oh, yeah... For the curious, I'm a Lymie (first infected in high school) with Epstein Barr (from a wild mouse bite, yeah I was stupid and picked one up by the tail when I was a kid) and had a bad Bartonella infection as a kid, very ill with the measles in high school (probably responsible for surgically corrected arrhythmia years later), nasty car accident, autoimmune flare ups, severe fibromyalgia, a nasty months long systemic CMV infection in 2007, declared completely disabled in 2008, but because I'm a stubborn aspie, I'm doing everything in my power to get back off disability. It's a slow climb up a steep mountain, but I believe blogging is the key to planning, the climbing gear, if you will. They say life sucks and then you die. Well, I want my life to suck as long as possible.

August 18, 2007

•  
  

       Boy.  That was a tough 5 minutes after they pulled out.  Me and Twinkles bawled our eyes out before we went back in the house.

  My sploit is off to Texas today to her new life with her fiance.  Time to start her new job, look for an apartment, get married…

  This was a small part of the loading process…  Boy, my camera is getting bad.

  

  Of course, the sploit wasn’t weepy one bit.  Look at that grin!  She has techno-JOY!!!!  Ok, private joke.

  

  It was a little early for Twinkles, but she was a real trooper, walking in the door at 6 a.m. in time for bacon and good-byes.

  

  Thodin.  The yucky green car that has been part of our driveway for years…  Today is probably the last day I’ll ever see Thodin again.  I think they have plans to trade it in later.  For some reason, this picture gets me more than all the rest.  I have so many memories of moving the sploit to college and back in Thodin.

  

  “Ready, Houston…”

  

  One more quickie pic of my baby….  *snif*

  

  Backing out…

  

  Now Twinkles is crashed on the couch until it’s time to go to work.  I’m feeling a weird sort of blue on my big stupid pills.  The chicken is cackling.  The dryer is going.  I am trying very hard not to think about how badly I wanted to be able to go on this caravan trip with them.

  *sigh*

August 18, 2008

• Finally starting to feel a little more normal, yay!  Finished the antibiotic this morning.  The body spasms are quieting down.  Have been sleeping a LOT.  Just about caught up on the usual chores. 
• Watched the Two Coreys season finale this morning, had it dvr’d.  I couldn’t believe all the pills Haim was on.  They didn’t name them all, but after dumping several other bottles, he argued to keep the vicodin (label said to take 4 a day) and the xanax.  Geez, dude.  I can barely handle 1/2 a vicodin at a time, and I have serious medical issues.  Any time I’m offered xanax and valium I turn them down, point blank.  I fear how hard I’ll work suddenly moving furniture around by myself if they knock the pain away and I have no inhibitions.  Good way for me to wind up in the ER.  You know, I never realized until I watched this season of the Two Coreys that I really am a seasoned drug abuser, under the guise of fibro and lupus.  I’ve been fighting to get off the meds for several years now, and dealing with withdrawals and the shock and recovery my body has to go through on top of being ill, and I’m convinced that the world of chronics and terminals is a serious issue of medication abuse, sponsored by pharmaceuticals, insurance, and the poor doctors caught in the middle.  When I’m on all the same medications that serious drug addicts wind up going into treatment for…  Just because I have an excuse to take them doesn’t mean it’s ok. 
• Scoped out a few sites on epstein barr.  Good lord.  No wonder my doctor was so quick to give me that handicap tag.  I didn’t realize how complicated that one is, and it’s just one of many wrecking me up through my life.  I know I seem pretty aggressive sometimes about digging up info on stuff, but in some ways I’m still pretty naive.  Here I was apologizing to my attorney for wanting to start up a disability case last November when I was so ill I could barely stand up and walk a straight line.  I blame the Asperger’s, I guess it just takes awhile for things to process and really hit me.  I fought the disability for so long, not realizing how much support I would have had even 20 years ago.
• Haven’t talked to my dad in nearly two weeks.  Keep thinking I should call and make sure he’s still ok with Mom’s care at the nursing home, but something in me keeps resisting.  He was calling me nearly every day and sometimes crying and angry, and I had to keep smoothing things out.  Scott’s mom is now driving herself all over creation every day, gets the boot off her broken ankle in about a week.  She has stopped calling me every day.  Well, I take that back.  She called me a few days back to ask if our land line phones were out from the rain and I said yes.  She called back the next day to ask if I’d called in to report yet and I said no.  (I’m very literal.  If she’d wanted me to do the calling, all she had to do was ask.)  Then she called me the next day about the wiring in their air conditioning, and once she found out Scott was available he started getting all the phone calls. 
•   I don’t do phones well.  I don’t do other people’s ‘panic’ well.  I’ve had to get through so much on my own without any kind of support at all, it’s incredible.  It wears me out terribly, as an aspie, to have to handle other people’s stuff.  I feel like I’m still recovering from all that constant problem after problem after problem this last month.  On top of my own problems.

August 18, 2009

Family meeting at the nursing home set for Sept. 1st.  I have so many feelings conflicting around even just the need for this meeting.  I don’t even have to take sides to dread this.  I’m not even on a side.  I see both sides, I see that both sides have blinders on and won’t budge, and I see that it all boils down to me being the main arbitrator because I’m legally in charge of both parents.  I just wish my dad would stay home more.  He’s a good guy, but he just needs to relax and have more of a life than hanging on every breath Mom takes.  If I had known Mom would make it this long, I really should have gotten a lawyer on this years ago.  And her own private room.

Scott picked two Walmart bags of tomatoes last night, half from the big Shop of Horrors bush under my kitchen window, the other half from the bush that fell over two months ago in the flower bed.  When the coffee kicks in (not sure it this will work, the first cup wobbled me back into bed) I wanna get a cookie sheet out and roast a whole bunch to freeze back in little bags for future batches of settler’s beans and spaghetti sauce.

@ 11:30 a.m.

What a long day.  I’m in slo-mo.  It’s so bad that I wrote down that I took a pill, and 15 minutes later could have sworn I never actually took it.  Just writing it down doesn’t mean I took it… dang it.

And I can’t go back to bed because I finally wandered in there and stripped it.    It’s a good thing I’m so far ahead on food, because I don’t think I could cook a meal from scratch today.  I’d wander off in the middle of something and forget I was doing it.

 @ 1 p.m.

I’m willing to entertain the notion that I’m having some depression.  Took 4 hours to get that cookie dough mixed.  My brain shuts down completely every time I think about either 1- my next doctor appt, 2- the nursing home meeting, or 3- the disability hearing.  Ugmo.  Eating a warm cookie.  It’s helping.  Put half the dough into the freezer for another day. Watched a new episode of The Universe, they finally made a new one.  I would sure love to lose myself in just thinking about stars and galaxies. Decided to throw a good *what the heck* to the wind and threw mine and Scott’s pillows in the wash.  Scott’s is line dry only, but I’m going to throw it in the dryer anyway.  If he winds up sleeping on a ball, it might prompt him to go buy a new pillow after two years of saying he’s going to buy a new pillow.  I have no idea how old this one is, but it’s gross, and I’m tired of waiting.

August 18, 2010

• Today is chiro and the grocery store.  This will force me to get a shower.  I’m having the hardest time getting more than 2 showers a week in this month.
  That meaty soup yesterday turned out really good.
  No brain yet this morning.  See ya.

August 18, 2011

I scanned the crap outa the wedding book before Scott took it back this morning with our order, which is now only for show so other people ordering pix won’t think we’re awful parents, because we could easily print them out on our own photo paper now.  We’re just getting 3 pix, of the whole family, the 3 generations, and bride’s parents with the couple. As we were going through the book and noticing all the other family photos, Scott couldn’t help noticing how often *** and her current guy showed up, and how few pix we were in, and it became obvious that Twink didn’t make it clear with the photographer exactly who the family ~was~….

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
My perfect bow made it in the album.

August 18, 2012

I really think this weird bladder spasm thing is my lower back kicking off again. Been having problems with it ever since all the mess started up with Andy, then gram, then Scott’s stuff, and now I’m having trouble moving and bending again, and starting to get pains down my legs. Might have to start back weekly with chiro. Also thinking about getting back into core strength training for my spine. (retrospect edit- it did turn out to be severe fibro and was only relieved with many weeks of ASTYM therapy over several months- I can't even begin to describe the pain and the way it referred around nerve centers)

August 18, 2013

Day 7 of norco withdrawal +_+ 

I think the worst should be about over. Been a zinger week, nothing like going through opiate withdrawal on prednisone and round the clock benadryl. I’ve lost 3 pounds, at least. Hitting coffee a little early. 

Tonight is utterly sleepless, only 1 1/2 hours so far. Slept real good earlier in the week, surprisingly, probably all the extra benadryl, even though I was wired to the gills. 

August 18, 2014

*** got back home today, will probably retire now. Scott took his mom and Twink out to see him come in. *** got married Saturday, and after they were pronounced and kissed they locked light sabers. I heard her blade was red, which is Sith, lol.

I finally got a couple of weekends off in a row, and dang if I didn’t get in my bedroom with a forklift. Got that stupid dresser and armoire OUTA there. Scott says I can have a new dresser any time now, so maybe over this next week I can finish up the piles of stuff that have been amassing again since Twink got pregnant. I’ve been using a broken drawer on the floor for at least two years. Was supposed to get a new dresser a long time ago, but Twink getting pregnant and piling in here (rather her here than some place stupid!) and then moving around and then popping the kiddo early practically on top of me having surgery, and then keeping us busy every weekend (and more) since then, this whole last year has been like riding out a string of tornadoes. We’re exhausted. Anyway, I caught a second wind and boy howdy, my bedroom is getting a very badly needed makeover.

My nerves are quietly going into shock. Here we are again, a year later, not sure whether my blogs will disappear. Was hoping to have a little money this fall, but still not sure yet about Xanga renewing. I need to get this book wrapped up. I’m glad I didn’t meet my last two deadlines because I am really liking the conversations I’ve had about breaking it down some more, stretching it out, filling it in. Work of art. I need to do it justice. It’s not just another story being tossed out there, it’s my histoire philosophique. It’s me putting Camus and Lewis onto the same gourmet sandwich. I really do believe I can pull this off, but in the middle of all this other duress and another blog salvage…? I’ve always said I do love a challenge. My whole life has been like the Tour de France.

human error, medical records, and making our own decisions

Loving the new centralized medical records I have access to now online. I can see that just before Christmas in 2010 two inches was temporarily added to my height, and right after New Year's in 2011 a hundred pounds was suddenly added to my weight. My highest recorded blood pressure over 4 years was 194/92 and my lowest was 99/66. My slowest recorded pulse of 60 was on Valentine's Day of 2013, so I apparently wasn't a hot date that day. I can also see that my CMV test came back negative for reactivation, but you can see I am a positive carrier.

 

I've been worried about CMV reactivation since I got home from vacation in the middle of May, thinking maybe I got too run down. It hit me a few days ago that part of this weird bloating and pain and super fatigue *might* be the pain medication my doctor had me try last April and then take on vacation in May, which, yes, was a lifesaver, but now that I'm back home I can tell that it's a crutch and taking it every day might be causing some very unhealthy side effects. (I'm always the person who gets the rare side effects, and I seem to be hitting a jackpot this time.)

I was diagnosed with a liver condition called NASH some years ago after one gastroenterologist strongly advised me to stop taking Ansaid, which I'd been on for ten years, so I imagine it could be likely that a similar medication might irritate the crap out of my poor innards. So I stopped taking it, and whadayaknow, my tummy is deflating, eating isn't hurting any more, and my increased heart rate and blood pressure are coming back down. I was feeling so rotten that I even wondered if maybe I had a kidney infection, but I never got a fever or other symptoms for that.

I have to give serious consideration to weighing the pros and cons of meds since I have an inch long spot they watched on my liver for a couple of years, so here we go, time to wing it again, off the meds and just dealing head on with whatever hits me again. Beats living with feeling like I have pancreatitis. If you've ever had that or know anyone who has, you know it SUX. I'll take fibromyalgia and trigeminal neuralgia any day over that and my liver swelling up again.

So now that the big drive to Houston and back is over, I'm back in ASTYM therapy and menu planning around higher protein intake and lots of raw veg and salads, hoping to get past this fatigue wall I keep crashing into. Crossing my fingers that stopping the med solves the problem. Stopping meds has worked wonders in the past.

I don't advise cold turkey withdrawal for anyone who has been on meds for years, and I strongly recommend you don't do it without your doctor's knowledge. I've been through some nasty backlash withdrawals that had me going back for 'rescue' meds, but in the long run, I've been much healthier getting back off meds than staying on them.

Meds are awesome for short term rescues, but when they become bandaids they turn into epic fail, and a body can become so dependent on multiple meds to keep functioning that suddenly cutting them off can result in catastrophic events. It takes a lot of grit and planning to untangle and extricate oneself from handfuls of medications and find ways to get healthy despite being in very dire straits to begin with, but it CAN be done, if people wanna live bad enough. It's too easy to medicate and let stuff roll over you till you finally just die, but either way, you die in a lot of pain. Handfuls of meds do. not. stop. that.

There is a lot of pressure to take medications, and sometimes they really do help. I grew up mostly without doctors, partly a religious or belief choice my parents had, but that was replaced with gimmicks like you wouldn't believe. I still can't walk past certain sections in health food stores without feeling ill and nearly throwing up because of all the stuff that my mom poked down my throat as a kid. None of it cured illnesses, and none of it prevented more illnesses, especially diabetes.

Our bodies are very good at handling problems if we make sure they have the materials they need to do that. Science has already confirmed that good hydration, plenty of good sleep and rest, excellent nutrition, moderate exercise, and finding ways to lower our stress do more good than anything, whether we are on medications or not. It doesn't matter how much you wax your car, if you don't change the oil once in awhile it's going to start wearing down. Likewise, we can put on all the makeup and pretty clothes and lotions we want, but if we're not eating good food and running around half dehydrated from sugary drinks and excessive alcohol, we get gunked up inside and our bodies have a harder time working right. We call that growing old, but I have been reverse aging since I weaned off my meds and changed my lifestyle. No gimmicks.

This is hard, and I'm going to miss my crutch again. It's nice having a few hours a day where I don't feel so rough. But I have to be honest with myself, it's also scary to think I could slide back into that complacence where I pop a pain pill instead of getting up out of my chair to do my stretches and then move around getting a little exercise because I don't hurt quite as badly when I'm moving around. Pills make it too easy to be still. Medications make it too easy to accept less than optimal conditions for my body. One little pill every day is making me lazy and sloppy, and I'm watching all that hard work to better health slip away again.

It's a choice. I don't blame anyone for wanting relief in their lives. But I want to win the game. I'm going to be the one crawling out of the muddy ditch and capturing the other team's flag while the rest of you slobs laugh it up getting wasted. 


My way of whistling in the dark.

creepy crawley slimey wimey

You might be able to click that and get a t-shirt.

The cute little tummy bug ravaging the countryside made it to my house at the height of its mutating glory, and there was no amount of yogurt eating, hand washing, and laundry burning that could stop it. I did manage to hold it off for a week and thought I outwitted it, but I may as well have let people just spit in my mouth because everyone agrees I added more spectacular to the side effects than any other sickie we knew. I'm pretty sure I lived through a plague of biblical proportions, so I don't apologize for my entire week's schedule going through a shredder.

On the other hand, this is the first big bug I've come through in ten years that didn't take me down longer than a handful of days. What changed? First off, there's this, from Yahoo Health.

A study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that eating 100 g of sugar (think three cans of soda) significantly hampered the ability of white blood cells to kill bacteria for up to 5 hours afterward. 

That's right, I had already changed my diet because I found out I'm diabetic. This is a huge deal for me because I'm a spoonie and sometimes need to take steroid meds for lupus flareups. Where most people are sick for about a week, I usually drag on for two or three weeks. One year I was still dragging around months after other people got better, so weak I could barely walk across my own house. And since I found out four years ago that I'm diabetic, I know now all it takes to knock me down even on a good day is pancakes and hash browns for breakfast, so getting that diagnosis and then cutting the carbs way down has been beyond a blessing for me.

Finding the happy medium with my immune system has been a rough road. I don't fear illness as much as I fear my body's response to it. I've been through germs that triggered so much immune reaction that I had to take medications just to hold my body down, and when meds are overdone at all the wrong times, that leaves less immune system function to react to the illness. It's a vicious circle, and hot debates still rage over whether we should let go of meds and go back to simpler living, which for spoonies can mean death inching a little closer every time we get a common cold, and most of us aren't ready to deal with that yet. The hardest part is disentangling whether it's a germ invasion, immune response, or intervening with medications that is actually causing fatigue so severe that nearly all function around the home stops for sometimes weeks. Treatment boils down to cycling through follow up labs to make sure nothing is going too wacky and simply keeping the patient comfortable when no one knows what else to do. What a surprise to find out the real cause behind all that lag was what I was eating, because untreated diabetes lurked underneath everything else.

I lived on handfuls of pills for two decades. That's a long time. I have barely been taking anything in the last four years, and over this last year actually got down to just thyroid and blood pressure pills for about six months. My quality of life is waaaaay better than it used to be, and this week I'm so surprised at how quickly I'm getting well after being ravaged with germ warfare. This would not have been possible if I hadn't changed my diet. I cannot stress enough how difficult it is for your body to function during illness if it can't function correctly every day to begin with, and if you know something you eat throws you off and you eat it anyway- BAD!!!  But yeah, we all do it.

I still have a long way to go. Somewhere around day three I was able to start eating a little again, and all I could get down was carbs... So I took it slow. Small snacks spread through the day. Day four was a little better and I was able to add milk and a tiny amount of other protein back in and by bedtime I was able to eat a salad. Day five was yesterday, and by then I was starving for meat, so I had a pretty good protein day. But I'm noticing that even though I managed to keep my blood sugar down, I'm having some old issues popping up, mainly dysesthesia.

A very common side affect of living with diabetes is the development of peripheral nerve problems, notably numbness, tingling, hot spiky sensations, shooting pains, and more. Since I have been living with nerve damage from a car accident since I was 19, and the abnormal nerve sensations and pain that come with nerve damage, and then the impact that lupus flareups have had on my nervous system, I've noticed for years that every time I get ill I wind up with generalized nerve pain all over my body. It's difficult to describe your actual nervous system having pain, but I can feel my nerve trunk down my back and branching off throughout my body when I have that weird pain. The closest I can come to describing it is feeling like I'm having a migraine all over my body, complete with sparkly aura sensations and nausea and sometimes throbs. Oddly, pain medication doesn't touch this at all. Finding out that diabetes was probably making it ~worse~... wow.

You'd think I'd be relieved when all this started simply just feeling numb about a year and half ago, but I found that pretty terrifying. A few months ago during a follow up with a neurologist we had a great talk about how diabetes slows down healing, and since my body is still healing from nerve damage (nerve pathways take longer to heal than any other organ damage), the dysesthesia I'm feeling is probably indicating more healing, as the pain levels are going down since I started controlling my diabetes. He said every time I get sick I will probably notice an increase in the dysesthesia because illness also diverts resources away from old healing to overcoming the current illness. The best thing I can do for my nervous system is SLEEP WELL, good nutrition, great hydration, keep my stress low, and find things to enjoy to take my mind off worrying.

He's right, I didn't even notice when the weird numbness faded. Until now. Wow, I feel so weird today. I feel like my whole body is half cloaked in dark matter, I'm just not getting all the input into my brain from everything that's going on below my skull. At first it was pretty unnerving (ha, I love that pun so much), but then I remembered all this stuff and now I'm not worried. I've been through this before, mild numbness from my face to my feet, but I'm still walking around just fine, still breathing and thinking just fine, even feeling well enough now to get some chores going again.

I feel like it's getting pretty obvious now that I can almost trigger this weird dysesthesia with what I'm eating. I remember years of living with nerve pain, all those handfuls of pills, getting through every single day for decades was so hard but I was determined I could do it because I wasn't done yet. I never dreamed I'd make it to a place where a little bit of mild numbness would be my biggest worry. I mean, my eyelids are numb right now. It feels so weird when I blink. If you've ever had Bell's Palsy you probably have some clue what I'm saying. It's not the same as being numbed at the dentist, but it's kind of like that shot is half worn off and just stays that way.

I'm pretty thrilled that I've reached a day where I could get this all figured out and share it. I know a lot of people out there are having some wicked bad days. I know it's hard hanging on to any hope that you'll ever feel better. I know you cry. I know other people don't understand and you feel alone. And I know that sometimes your only comfort is the thing that makes you feel the worst, be it a med addiction or a sugar addiction. I know how much that blue popsicle means to you.

This post is a hug, and I hope you get your stuff figured out. And even if you do, I hope you want to feel better badly enough to make it through the hard part of turning your world upside down to change it, moment by long dark moment. The hardest part for me took about two years. Never cold turkey off meds, do your research first, keep a doctor in the loop, make a plan and clearly state your purpose, pre-apologize to all the people whose heads you're going to bite off along the way, and take that step.