2008 has been a hell of a year for me in terms of health... My body has gone through so much since January, it;s been one thing after another, and emotionally it is finally taking its toll. I am not sure how much more I can handle...
January I started having severe charlie horses all over my body, legs, feet, arms, sides, neck.. weird places. Terms like Fibromyalgia were thrown out. I was given pain meds for them but I don't like having to resort to taking medication for pain when I've dealt with the forefront of it my whole life. The cramps are a bit more few and far between now, thankfully, but when they do appear they are fairly severe and I get them multiple times in a row, the one morning I woke up and had 9 in my right leg and 4 in the other all in a row...
End of January I have an accident and fall on the ice twice in one day, once at work, once at home. I ended up hurting my back and my knee. 6 weeks of physical therapy and worker's comp. My back still bothers me a bit to this day, I've never injured my back before, and it's in a crappy spot in the lower back where you can really never get comfortable. And when I am walking around it bothers me a lot.
During that time I started getting horrible looking lesions all over my legs, very painful, discolored, just ugly-ass blotches all over me. Turns out the injection I was on decided to turn against me after 6 years of being on it, and I developed a rejection-type-allergy to it and it poisoned me. It took a while to find a new medication to replace it, in the mean time, without the medication, I relapse very badly. Some days not even being able to get out of bed on my own or dress myself. So from Jan-April, all my doctors went back and forth trying to find the right medication to replace the injection, in the mean time, doping me up on steroids to try and make up for the loss of the other medicine. Anyone who's been on prednisone knows what it can do to your body and mind. It made me miserable, moody. And of course the water weight, and what I call 'steroid face' the chubby cheeks one can get from being on steroids for a while. From being on such steady high doses since January, now my body is addicted to it. I try to ween myself below 20mg a day and instantly my body relapses.
March, my knees were doing fairly badly, partially as a result of losing my most important medication, needed cortisone shots. Early March I had been talking with an ex who wanted to get back together with me, he was a great guy but during the time I was seeing him, get this, he was afraid I would be too intimidated by his health problems, he had leukemia... a few weeks later we got into a little fight about how he abandoned me for half a year because he didn't want me to know about his health.. a few days later he fell into a co ma and his aunt called me telling me he passed away... I blamed myself for the longest time, occasionally still do. 'If I had been nicer would things have been different?' If I had been nicer to him while he was there in his hospital bed, telling me how much he loved me, maybe he'd have wanted to be stronger enough to fight through...
Between April and May I was doing well! I was healthy with little pain and they had found a new medication to replace the Enbrel injection. In May I even went on vacation by myself for a few weeks.
Now the end of June I start feeling massively fatigued all the time, my neck is swollen, I just plain feel miserable, I'm losing weight and not eating as much and all I do is sleep when I am not working. Docs ran some labs and my wbc and lymph counts are high and an ultrasound revealed a cyst on my thyroid. A new specialist for Mel? Sure why the hell not.
It just seems like when one thing is taken care of, something else has to go wrong that no one can find answers for. It's getting so frustrating, 7 solid months of this, and I just don't wanna do it anymore.
My parents have been nothing short of super supportive and helpful during everything I have been through this year. They see how hard I am working on top of all of this and they know I am really trying.
I've never been one to bitch like this in such a 'why me?' fashion, because I know there are so many in the world so much worse off than I, but I am starting to reach the peak of my boiling point here. I am just ...losing my spirit.
I'm always known as the happy one, the strong one, the positive one. Now my doctors think I am starting to get depressed. I guess considering everything I've been through, even a healthy person would be... but I'm the happy one... aren't I supposed to stay that way?
I'm breaking...
