Alan and Mom. Mom was such a huge help the week of my procedure. Thanks, Mom!!

The Move

Yesterday I started cleaning out the kitchen cabinets and drawers. No, I’m not packing myself. Alan’s job hires people to do that, so why would I?

What I’m doing is trying to eliminate all things that I do not want or use so that I don’t have to unpack them in a few weeks. We have way too much junk.

Junk. Just junk.

How do we all accumulate so much of it?

Is it the result of retail therapy gone overboard?

The inability to let go? I don’t know. But somehow every two years, we haul off truck loads and truckloads of our old stuff to Goodwill and the dump.

Occasionally, we sell a thing or two. I got $25 for an Ergo baby carrier…

Bye-bye, Ergo, we had a love/hate relationship anyway.

I sold a Mickey Mouse Cake Pan for $5. Because let’s face it. I bought it 2 years ago and never used it. I’m obviously too intimidated by the directions and the hand cramping to actually decorate a Mickey Mouse cake.

My hand hurts now, just thinking about squeezing out all those icing stars.

So yeah, we’re moving. We still don’t actually have a house to move INTO yet, but we hand over the keys to this one on June 25th.

Do you know what the funny part is? The funny part is that my California Health Crisis earned me a plane ticket with JD, so I don’t even have to participate in pack and load week or the cross-country road trip. I leave on the 20th.

……Oh. my. goodness. Daniel is watching Teletubbies. I thought we killed those obnoxious things off years ago. How? How are they suddenly back here, back into our lives????

“Daniel, please, please, don’t watch this show. I can’t take it. It’s too dumb.”

“Yeah,” Daniel agreed. Now we’re watching an alphabet video. It’s not too bad.

What was I saying? OH YEAH! Our moving plan. I ended up getting the super-sweet side of the stick, thanks to my psoriatic arthritis issues.

Mom and Me at Point Lobos. We’ve established that Pt. Lobos is what I will miss most about California, right?

The Psoriatic Arthritis

Psoriatic arthritis is basically pronounced sorry-attic arthritis. In my head, I also call it sorry ass arthritis because that’s what it makes me feel like.

It’s back, and it’s ugly, and I’ve just stopped playing around about it. My big toe swelled, but I’ve figured out a way to walk without using it, and then I bumped it just a tiny bit on JD’s potty stool, and now it’s swollen, bruised, and bloody.

The ligament that connects my knees to my hips is inflamed all the way up, on both sides, and my left thumb is permanently bending slower than all of my other fingers. The shoulder tendonitis is back too. But at least the plantar fasciitis finally went away. So, there’s that.

The Heart

I asked my cardiologist about what anti-inflammatory meds I could take. I need them right now, for this flare-up and the up-coming travel.

He was obviously not too concerned. He said, “As long as you don’t take cocaine or meth, I’m good.”

As you can see, my cardiologists are super worried. Not.

I had my last appointment the other day. Dr. G is my super-soft-spoken but very personable electrophysiologist, a.k.a. a highly educated heart doc that specializes in electrical problems of the heart, arrhythmias such as ventricular tachycardia.

He was actually kind and sympathetic about my Linq monitor. Wait. A kind and sympathetic doctor? What is this new thing?? I’ve just had bad doctor luck these past two years, so this was a nice change.

He’s funny too. I asked if anything had shown up on my Linq monitor. He explained that he has the parameters on the thing set so that the v-tach won’t register unless it’s over 195 bpm or at least 16 beats in a row.

“Ha! I don’t think it’s ever that bad,” I said.

“Well, I set it that way because that’s the point at which we would need to do something about it.” he explained.

Sure.

“Can I put off going to a cardiologist for a while because I’ve got so much to do with this move… I feel like I’ve been to the cardiologist enough for one year anyway…”

“Yes, of course, you have a lot going on. Take care of that, and then you can get a new cardiologist. UNLESS you have symptoms.”

“I have a lot of symptoms lately, but none long enough to set off the monitor (16 beats), so what do I know?”

“Well, that’s because you got a plate full of s***.”

Haaa!!!  Ain’t that the truth.

I’m always surrounded by children or other stay-at-home moms or home school moms, so I don’t hear a lot of conversational swear words. So now when I do hear them, it’s really hard not to giggle. Yeah, I probably did snicker.

Oh, well. Dr. G says he’s not worried about my v-tach. My heart is structurally fine.  His actual words were, “You’re not going to die suddenly in your sleep or anything.”

Ha! So there’s my good news of the day, folks. I’m not going to die suddenly in my sleep, at least not this year. It sounds like a joke, but that DOES happen to v-tach sufferers when there is heart disease present or with an inherited condition, like Brugada. However, when those things aren’t present, and the v-tach is short, like mine, it is considered benign.

JD was seriously THIS small when we moved in!! 2 years ago!!

I have a good sense of closure from this California Health Crisis chapter: the pain, the fevers, and the heart thing…Most of it was all from psoriatic arthritis, which mostly goes away if I don’t eat wheat or get too stressed. So there you go. I’m learning how to better take care of myself.

And the funny part…

So did you catch the part about Alan? Did you read that right? They wrote me out of the cross-country move and the pack week. SOOOO..  Alan will be overseeing the pack out and the cross-country move by himself, along with our three oldest children. That’s right. Alan is  doing a week-long road trip with Joshua, Caleb, and Daniel.

I know. Poor Alan. What kind of a wife am I? Well, I’ve done all the other pack and moves, thank you, most of them by myself. But yes, I usually shipped off the kids.

I’ve asked him repeatedly to send another kid on the plane with me, to lighten his load. But Alan says it will be fun.

I’ll give you a minute to laugh…

It won’t be dull, anyway. You gotta give him that. A friend of ours suggested that we should strap a Go-pro on Alan for this trip. It would surely make for a funny video.

Nah, what am I saying? Our kids are perfect angels, and so are we.

In fact, today I gave Cherielle a ride home from church, and Alan had all four boys with him because we’re trying to keep the van CLEAN, in order to sell it.

Alan decided to take all the boys with him to the grocery store.

While he was there, there was quite a spectacle. A certain five-year-old boy took a gold “good behavior” reward coin from his big, eight-year-old brother.

“Hey, give that back!” the eight-year-old demanded.

But the little guy only clutched the good-behavior coin even tighter. Oh, the irony..

So the two ended up WRESTLING IN THE FLOOR of the check-out line over this coin. The oldest boy, a ten-year-old, was dismayed and embarrassed at his younger brothers’ behavior, so he started punching the middle one in the back saying, “Cut it out! Get up! Cut it out!”

my little wrestlers with Aunt Janet and Nonna

Don’t worry. They were quickly apprehended, and upon their return home, appropriate consequences were measured out. I’m sure those weren’t our little angels, scrapping it out over a Sunday School coin in the floor of the grocery store….Nah….

I’m just thankful I was not at the grocery store. I was at home putting the frozen pizzas in the stove.

Just another day in paradise, y’all. Have a great week!

The post The Move, My California Health Crisis, and The Grocery Store Scuffle appeared first on Stories of Our Boys.

Ah youth. Where did you go, youth??

My Battle with Chronic Pain Part III: The Pain Returns

It reminds me of that song: “The cat came back the very next day; it just couldn’t stay away.”

Life was going well, and I was on cloud NINE, being finished with my very first year of home schooling! Wahoo! Summer! I made big plans.

But why wouldn’t I? I was young and healthy. I should be able to handle a cross-country flight and a few short road trips. Right? And don’t give me the, “You just need to be more active,” talk because I was being active. The problem was all the sitting and riding!

It started with the plane, it worsened with each car trip, and I took several.

When I first arrived in Florida, Alan called me from home, “I made you a doctor’s appointment.”

“Why?” I asked. I hate doctor’s appointments, and I had been doing so well.

“For your back!”

“My back is better. I’m good, Alan, I don’t need a doctor.”

“Ehhh, I think you do. Let’s keep the appointment, and you’ll probably be glad you have it by the time you get home.”

Heh? Did my husband just do a little soothsaying? Was he saying that he knew I’d be back to hurting by the time I got home?

I shrugged it off. I enjoyed my vacation. He joined us. We took even more car trips in the South.

fun in the sun

And Alan was right. I was happy to go to the doctor by the time I got home. What is it with airplane and car rides??? I don’t think this is normal.

The doc was a super friendly chap. He offered me a shot for my shoulders to loosen them up. I declined. I’ll never forget seeing my mom get a shot for a similar shoulder problem. It hurt much worse before it felt better. No thanks. My shoulders are more stiff than they are painful, so I’m not that desperate yet.

The Physical Therapy Phase

He sent me to physical therapy for my hip.

I tend to lean towards my left when I sit to keep the pressure off my bad hip. That hip hurts bad when it flares up.

“Why are you sitting like that?” the physical therapist, Ryan, asked me.

I’m so dumb. I went straight into defensive mode instead of patient-being-helped-by-a-doctor mode.

“What? Like how?” I asked trying to straighten my posture.

“All cocked to one side.”
“I don’t know.” Yes, yes I do know. Why didn’t I just admit my hip hurt? That’s what I was there for, geesh.

Doctors are always asking me questions that are probably super obvious, but I haven’t thought about it. So two days later, bam! I always figure out the answer to their questions. And that is why I am so thankful for physical therapy.

Yes, they made me do stretches, exercises, taught me how to squat properly, etc., etc. But the biggest thing was that I finally began to learn what I had begun to truly want to know:  What is wrong with me????

Ryan would work on an area, and I noticed that he knew the exact name for every single thing he worked on.

“That hurts bad. What is that?” I’d ask him.

“That’s a muscle.”

“What muscle is it?”
“That’s your tensor fasciae latae muscle. It’s a compensatory muscle.”

I learned that the tensor fasciae latae, and several other muscles become inflamed when the more essential core muscles are weak, but I also learned that those muscles tighten down when they are protecting something that’s injured underneath.

“Yow! What is that?” I have more angry muscles, tendons, and bursa than I had ever realized.

“That’s your iliotibial band. You’d be better off if I don’t work on that. You need to roll it at home with a rolling pin.”

He was right. He did work on it right before Christmas break, and every where he touched it there were little bitty bruises for a couple of weeks.

Physical therapy was fantastic. My favorite part, besides just being so happy to get out of my house, was the ice therapy at the end. They laid ice over my achy shoulder muscles and that evil iliotibial band, which is a tendon that runs down the right side of the thigh.

I was able to learn so much from my physical therapist because he was actually able to see me enough times to know the real deal about what was going on. The doctors, on the other hand, only have that one visit to go off, in which I answer all their questions wrong but realize what I should have said days later.

And then I finally had a lumbar MRI and a shoulder MRI. The verdict was in: not a single thing wrong with my spine. Ryan was right.

And the shoulder: tendonitis and torn muscles.

I asked to see a rheumatologist. I did this because I had done some research and came across a disease that sounded so much like me. Yep. I’m guilty. Self-diagnosis.

Enter the Rheumatology Phase

Now you want to talk about life-changing self-evaluation questions. My rheumatologist asks questions that I simply go blank on.

“How long does it hurt in the morning?”

Ummmm I never thought about it that way. Some days it does not ever go away. Some days I don’t hurt at all..

So I said, “I don’t know. Once I get going, I’m okay.”

I hated not knowing, and why have I never noticed? Then he asked me which is worse, morning or night?

I have no idea!

So I’m making a chart. It’s enlightening. Every day really is different.

So let me tell you what I think I might have (but of course I’m not a rheumatologist):

Psoriatic Arthritis: This disease is hallmarked by joint inflammation, which I have yet to be able to prove, except for tendonitis. Tendonitis is also part of PsA, though. So is nail psoriasis. You can read more about it here. (rheumatology.org link)

Was I right? We still aren’t sure, but we’re working on figuring it out. I could be dead wrong.

In fact, I had a rheumatology appointment this week. I do like my rheumatologist. He wasn’t convinced of the PsA. My blood work did not help me any, as it was free of any inflammatory markers. The day they did the blood work I felt pretty good. But he has ordered a hip MRI.

What is the deal with all the torn muscles, tendonitis, and bursitis (in both hips) if it isn’t psoriatic arthritis? That IT band syndrome that I have in my legs is called “runner’s knee”. Only I’m not running anymore, haven’t run since JD was born.

Over Christmas, I figured I’d get rid of all of this. I would just rest.

“Rest will fix it all,” I assured my parents, as I spent the entire vacation, practically, laying in bed. I literally could not sit down. The pain was even radiating into my pelvis bone, when I was lying in bed.

I love this photo by Janet. I literally woke up, rolled off my ice packs, posed for this picture, and went back to my ice packs.

My internet research assured me that rest is the way to fix tendonitis or bursitis.

Of course, that didn’t work. I finally went to urgent care and got a steroid shot.

The nurse practitioner assured me, “This will help, temporarily, but if you’ve had bursitis for three years, a steroid shot is not going to take care of it.”

It did help enough to get me through that plane ride, but returning to a wet California did not help. By Wednesday, I developed a terrible limp. It was so hard to walk.

And guess what, by Friday I could walk completely fine again. In fact, on Thursday and Friday, the sun came out and I felt down right wonderful. I was so excited.

Maybe this flare up is coming to an end, and I am excited about that, but I’m desperate to get to the bottom of it. Now the whole family is telling me I can’t go on the cross country road trip in the spring because I never know whether I will wake up completely incapacitated or not.

I have a doc appointment on Monday. We’re going to address my anxiety level, my heart,  and the renewal of my physical therapy referral.

This is getting personal. Rest didn’t work. Maybe exercise and nutrition will. It’s time to put this Humpty Dumpty back together again, and I mean business.

I do want you to know that while I was stressing out about this earlier this week, I am doing much better both physically and emotionally now. Even if I never find out “what’s wrong.” it will be okay.

“He, whose heart is kind beyond all measure,
Gives unto each day what He deems best,
Lovingly its part of pain and pleasure,
Mingling toil with peace and rest.”   (from the Hymn Day By Day, my favorite hymn)

I hope you all have a wonderful weekend!

In case you missed it:

Part I: My Battle with Chronic Pain

PartII: My Battle with Chronic Pain

The post My Chronic Pain Battle Part III: The Cat Came Back the Very Next Day appeared first on Stories of Our Boys.