Let's talk tough, shall we (and save the feel-goods for the end)...
"Be kind - everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle." (Ian McLaren) While your life may have been easier or more difficult than mine, the question relates specifically to a difficult time [for me] in my life, so I ask for a little space for this, dear reader.
My life hasn't been easy, for starters, but I could spend an entire book on that. Narrowing it down to a single, difficult time, is not easy, but I would pinpoint a few years ago, a trip to the hospital, and a serious health scare as the most difficult.
See, I get migraines. Not just a headache, but blinding, mind-bending, personality altering migraines. If you've never had one, well... Think of having a cold, the worst flu ever, a sinus infection and having your wisdom teeth pulled without anesthetic, all at the same time. Thinking hurts. Light hurts. Hearing your kids laugh... hurts. Without medication to manage them, I get migraines daily.
Every. Single. Day.
Most migraine medicines knock you out. Yes, there are a few out there that don't, but there are serious health risks (like serious fatigue and death) to taking those every single day. So, I'm on a medication to control them, and it works pretty well. I now get only 2 or 3 a month, versus 28-30 a month.
The first management medication I was on worked GREAT! For about 2 years. But because of that period when I was taking the short-acting migraine pills 3 or 4 times a day, every day, I would have these little periods of time where I'd just zone out. Poof. I'd be talking, and would just stop. Wasn't responding, couldn't move. My doc decided that these appeared to be a form of seizure, and since my migraine control med was also an anti-seizure medicine, she upped my dose very, very slightly while we waited for my neurology referral to go through and for my appointment to come up.
The seizures got worse.
My lovely little dog, Freedom, who had already taught himself to alert to my fibromyalgia flare ups and anxiety attacks, started learning to notice the seizures, and my doctor got more worried. I was still taking a much, much lower dose than even the lowest dose for seizures (the dose for migraines is a fraction of the dose for seizures), so she upped me to a slightly higher dose, and put in a call to the neurologist to get me seen sooner.
The seizures got even worse.
I was no longer just freezing up. I was trembling. I couldn't talk after the episodes. They were getting substantially longer. But I was still a week away from my appointment. So, up went the dose to the minimum therapeutic dose for seizures.
They got even worse.
The night before my neuro appointment, I ended up in the ER by ambulance. My seizures were happening every hour, and I was out for 10-15 minutes at a time. Since I was going to the neuro the next day for testing, the ER discharged me without doing any further tests, and I went home with my mom, instead of going home with my husband. At this point, hubby decided it was time to surrender me to someone with some actual medical training until we figured out what was going on. I'd lost about 10 pounds in this last week before my appointment, just from not being able to get through a meal, and from the severe shaking during each episode.
I never made it to my neuro appointment...
The entire trip into the city for my appointment is totally lost to me. I apparently spent most of the trip going from one seizure to another, and we ended up in the ER, then admitted from there for emergency tests. To this day, I can't remember exactly how many days I spent in the hospital, hooked up to machines measuring my brain activity.
As out of it as I was, I still hadn't hit the bottom.
I had spent some of the weeks leading up to all this, discussing plans with my mom. We didn't know what was going on, and even though I'd been dealing with these migraines for almost 3 years, no one had bothered doing an MRI (mind you, every doc I saw wanted to know if one had been done), so there were still a lot of possibilities out there. When I say we were discussing plans, I'm talking things like burial and my youngest daughter's education, dealing with my ex and talking to my older kids; all that fun stuff that goes along with the "what if's". Hubby wouldn't go there with me, and I needed to make sure these things were worked out with someone.
And then, I hit bottom...
I'm guessing I'd been in the hospital for about a day and a half when I hit the scariest moment of my life (considering that I've had cancer biopsies twice and this scared me more.. that's saying something).
My sister had come to visit with her little ones, as she was in the city for something else. My hubby was there with me, as was Mom. I'm pretty sure that Mom never left my bedside the whole time I was there, and I'm pretty sure she never even left to use the restroom (credit 40 years of practice as an RN). Hubby went home nightly, and he was looking pretty haggard, even though he pretended he was okay. Thankfully, our daughter was not there at this moment in my life.
I woke up from a particularly nasty episode, and was clueless about where I was, when it was, and was truly confused about the people around me. When had my mom gotten so gray? And who was the guy standing beside her? And when the hell did my little sister grow up and have kids? I was missing 20 years of my life.
Here's where I plug my two biggest heroes: my mom and my husband. They've always been my heroes, but this was a moment when they both stepped up and rose to the occasion. Neither freaked out, just talked quietly with me to help me reorient to the time and place, and over the next few hours, we managed to piece together parts of my life that were most important.
There is absolutely nothing worse than the feeling a mom has when she can't remember her husband or kids.
After a few days of tests it was decided that I do not in fact have epilepsy. And weeks later, we ruled out anything fatal via MRI. It was determined that the seizure-like episodes I have are an extreme form of anxiety attack, and that the migraine med I had been on became toxic in my system. Both are fairly easy fixes, though almost 5 years later, I still have episodes and we get through them. Meds were changed, and maintaining a low-stress lifestyle has cut them down drastically to every few months rather than every few minutes. I still have gaps in my memory, though no particular explanation for the memory loss can be found. I figure that I've got the important stuff sifted back out of the dim recesses, and the details of years of abuse can just stay lost in the dark.
It took me months to get fully back on my feet. As in, I had to use a walker to get around, because my body had gotten so weak from those weeks of wasted energy. I'd lost almost 40 pounds to the tremors and lack of eating (those had no problem finding their way back to me, by the way).
Again, my husband and mom totally rocked in helping me meet my own goals for walking and being able to get around on my own. I still can't drive, but that's not a huge loss to me if I have any say in the matter.
What doesn't kill me makes me stronger...
I've been on a bit of a search in the years since that time in my life. And I've found a path that works well for me, even if not everyone in my life likes it. They're free to follow their own path, and I'll stay on mine, thank you very much.
My life has led me to look forward in the moments that I look up from "now" to plan where I'm going. So...
Where do I want to be in 10 years?
In our own home, with our own book shop, and my own Reiki practice. We've come a long way since my husband was discharged from the Army in 2007, and it's not been an easy road.
But all those difficult times in our life together has led us to a place of greater compassion for those with less, and a greater understanding of those with more. We've got a plan for where we want to be, including having our own home and business.
In 10 years, I'd like to have written and published at least a few books, and have our physical book store open and thriving. I'll have completed my Reiki master level, and would love to see that aspect of my business thriving alongside our bookstore. And we'd like to have a little bit of land up in the mountains for when we retire, someday. Though, I'm not sure that I'll ever completely retire from writing and Reiki. Some thing are a life-long calling that shouldn't be ignored.
I'm headed there. Little by little, things are falling into place. And they will continue to do so, as long as I stay on target and focused on those things in front of me, not the things behind me.
How about you? Where do you want to be in 10 years? Have those difficult moments in your life led you to who and where you are in this moment? Feel free to hop in the comments below and share, or jump over to my Facebook page and share them there.
Are you enjoying this series? I sure am. I'm finding that I have to think a lot deeper than I do on an average day, and it's a great way to find my writer's voice here in the blog. If you'd like to read the whole series from the beginning, click over here and check out the Intro. You can grab the list from there if you'd like to do this for your own blog, I just ask that you practice ethically and cite your sources, please. Then head over to the Facebook page and let us all know that you're doing this challenge, too, so we can follow along!
Until next time, Live Large, Lovelies!
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