Farewell to the person I once was

Several years ago I read a story about a couple who had a sort of funeral to say goodbye to who the wife once was. The wife had fibromyalgia and a few other health problems which had changed her life as she knew it. Both she and her husband accepted the fact that she would never be able to go back to being her old self so they instead said goodbye to that person and moved on.

I think my husband and I have slowly come to that same place in life. We both know that I am not the same person I used to be and have slowly started to accept it. As hard as it is for me, I can only imagine how hard it is for him. To see the person you fell in love with slowly change right in front of you can't be easy. Knowing that they will never be able to go back to who they once were has to be even harder.

But, he is the one person in my life who fully accepts me for who I am now because he is the one person who has been there and watched helplessly as I transformed. I have no doubt that he would have stopped or at least tried to slow down this change if he could. I can feel the frustration and pain he feels of not being able to do anything. I also know he feels the pain and frustration I have of not being able to stop it happening to me. He is the one person who has been there every day, every moment, as I slowly transformed into this person that even I don't recognize. Someone who I can't stand to look at in the mirror.

Yes, I look in the mirror and don't know the person looking back at me. Maybe my husband has accepted it more than I have. Maybe I loathe that person in the mirror because I know its the me that everyone else sees. The person who used to be full of life, determined, and always on the go but is now seemingly lazy and almost lifeless. I didn't used to think that way. I honestly thought others were seeing the slow transformation I was going thru and understood it. I just realized recently that they don't understand or even have a clue. Just recently my fears were confirmed. People don't see the pain and everyday struggles, all they see is someone who can no longer do what they were once able to do. Actually, in their eyes, I'm just someone who's gotten lazy and likes to sleep all the time. I so wish that were true, because then maybe I could in some way change it.

I know there are even people who think that my husband is to blame. As crazy as that sounds, its true. They haven't been there to see the daily struggles so they only assume that in some weird screwed up way he had some sort of control over me and I slowly changed. He sucked the energy right out of me and I stopped being sociable and doing things. If anything, he has been the one source of strength for me when it seemed like everything around me was falling apart. But no one sees that, because they didn't bother to be around enough to really see what was happening. The only ones who can even remotely understand are my kids and my husband because they're the ones who have had to suffer with me. But even they don't understand fully what is happening, because in all these years, not even my doctors can figure it out.

It would be so easy if I was diagnosed with something people understood. Oh, she has diabetes, or MS,or cancer, or something in the medical books so yeah, we can understand that so we'll feel some sort of compassion. But that's not what is happening. For 17 years my body has been slowly falling apart and not one doctor has been able to understand or pinpoint why. My last doctor tried, boy did he try, but he ended up retiring so I'm back to square one. He did figure out a few things the others couldn't though. He did figure out or at least entertain the idea that everything was in some way related and was all possibly a result of my AFE 17 years ago. How, he didn't know, but he knew there had to be something to that theory that so many other doctors had just blown off.

I had mentioned fibromyalgia but that's only one thing on the long list of items I have either been suspected of having, shown symptoms of, been diagnosed as having or tested for. The first in that long list was an amniotic fluid embolism, placental abruption and DIC during the delivery of my youngest son. A very rare occurrence and doctors still don't know what causes it. At the time of mine in 1997, the numbers showed an 80% mortality rate and of the 20% who were lucky enough to survive, the majority of those sustained some sort of neurological damage, ended up in a coma, or even brain dead. I was lucky in that I survived but not as lucky when it came to the after effects, which by the way there are no studies to show exactly what they are. After years of talking to other survivors, I'm finding out that there are in fact some serious and negative side effects from what we went thru. Its not just coincidence.

So yeah, my husband was right there. He watched the old me walk into the hospital that day. He was there beside me when everything wrong. We have talked about it a lot but there's one thing he told me a long time ago, and only once, which sticks in my mind. As he was standing there watching the doctors fight to save me that night, looking down at my body which had turned an ash grey because of the blood loss, he thought he had lost me. He had seen that look and color so many times before when someone dies. In a sense, he did lose me. The old me died on that table that night. She took almost every bit of fight and energy I had left with her. The old me was gone and over a week later, the me I am now left the hospital, not knowing just how much my life would change.

Still rolling along!

Its been almost a year and I'll admit, I got distracted. Along the way, we lost my mother-in-law, Vivian Truxell to liver failure caused by tylenol. Then, a month later we lost my son-in-law, Jeremy Elkins. We survived it but it hasn't been easy. I think there's still a lot of anger because of the way they died.

Prescription medications are supposed to help, not hurt you. In Vivians case, it happened so fast that it was too late by the time she was taken to the hospital. She died 3 days later. Vivian had gone through more than 8 back surgeries. She had injections, therapy, and took pain medicine for 15 to 18 years for it. Her doctor, who was also mine, kept a close watch on her blood work so this wouldn't happen. A few months after she passed away, he retired. Not because he did anything wrong but because they had been close friends for a long time and this really hit him.

She didn't intentionally overdose, she would never have done that because of her christian faith and her love for our son Matt. She knew how and when to take her meds and was very careful with it. Like I said, she had taken them for a very long time. So why all of a sudden did this happen? Why did she suddenly have such a lethal dose of tylenol in her body?

Did the prescription change and she didn't know it? Did she wake up in pain, forgot that she had already taken it and take it again, over and over? We don't know. Just a few days before, she had talked with a nephew in length and he said she was in a good frame of mind, acted normal and nothing seemed out of place. So why all of a sudden would this happen?

100 Miles an Hour...

 We go through life at 100 miles an hour and we never think about what it’s doing to our bodies,  we just keep moving on until one day it hits us.  All of a sudden we feel terrible and have no clue why.  It feels like we were hit by a bus when we wake up.  We are tired and have absolutely no energy. Our body hurts more with each movement. After a while we finally quit putting it off and go to the doctor. Most doctors will chalk it up to lack of sleep and are quick to prescribe antidepressants to help us de-stress so that we may sleep better. Some people will get lucky enough to have a doctor actually listen and try to figure it out. They may run various tests and do blood-work to try to see what is causing all the pain and issues. In the end though, a lot of doctors never see the full picture so they misdiagnose or even under-diagnose. Regardless, most doctors today are too quick to just treat the symptoms and move you on thru rather than take the time to actually find the underlying cause and properly treat that.

For some of us there is no rhyme or reason as to why we suddenly feel bad.  We were healthy or at least seemingly healthy most of our lives.  We thought we were eating right by avoiding this or that food and we tried to get enough rest and exercise. Some even avoided things like alcohol, tobacco and even drugs of any kind, over the counter or otherwise. I refused to even take a Tylenol.  Even so, something changed, and it wasn’t positive at all. My body got older and started letting me know it didn’t feel the same, but I ignored it and kept on rolling along at 100 plus mph. That is, until one day it stopped me dead in my tracks, almost literally!

Ok, here it is. On Weds Sept 30th I started drinking a new juice in hopes of it helping my fibromyalgia and overall crappy health. I can honestly say that a little over a week later I'm actually feeling better. Is it this juice? Time will tell...

Here's to my health. Here I will attempt to track my health for the next few months