Sometimes you have to remember your limits

As I’ve mentioned in passing several times, I have quite a list of chronic illnesses. At the end of my junior year of high school, I was bitten by a brown recluse spider, one of the only two types of poisonous to humans spiders. I had a hard, purple indentation on the outside of my upper left thigh; I thought nothing of it originally. I was a busy student, and it didn’t hurt. My bus driver saw it the next day, since I was wearing shorts, and she recognized it as a brown recluse bite. My mom took me to Patient First that evening, and the doctors there didn’t quite know what to do with me. I ended up with a tetanus shot, giant antibiotic pills, and instructions to call a plastic surgeon immediately the next day. The plastic surgeon the next day said the antibiotics were like hitting a fly with a sledgehammer, so I stopped taking those. I spent the summer going to the plastic surgeon to have the necrotic tissue scrapped out every few weeks. I have a small round scar on my leg, that occasionally hurts because of some slight nerve damage.

When I started back at school in that fall for my senior year, I started having digestive problems. I’m not a big fan of doctors, so I just kind of dealt with it for several years. By the end of my freshman year of college, I was down to 85 lbs, and couldn’t keep much food in me. So I finally went to a gastroenterologist, who told me I have Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), did some blood tests, and gave me a prescription for an anti-spasmotic for my intestines. About a year later, I was back up at college in Philadelphia, and was having horrid abdominal pains, and once again wasn’t able to eat much. I went to another gastro doc, who ran all of the invasive tests this time - abdominal and pelvic CT, endoscopy, and colonoscopy. She ended up diagnosing me with IBS again, and tried me on several different meds, each one just giving me nasty side effects. I got online, did some research, and started treating myself with peppermint oil capsules, soluble fiber supplements, and watching what I eat. I’ve still had flare ups, but I’ve pretty much been able to handle my digestive system ever since.

About six months later, I started having muscle pain in my shoulders and legs. I thought it was just because of my backpack and walking so far from my apartment every day. However, nothing I did made it go away, it just kept getting worse, and I was exhausted all the time. The message boards I was on for my IBS had several people who also have fibromyalgia, a frequently comorbid condition. They suggested I get checked out for fibro as well, as my symptoms sounded very similar and weren’t getting better. I went a rheumatologist who told me I couldn’t have fibro because I wasn’t depressed, which I knew was not a diagnostic criteria for fibro. Doing my own research online again, I found a fibro clinic just north of Philadelphia. I started seeing the doctor there the summer of 2005, and have been going there ever since. Even with all the blood tests other doctors had done, diseases had been missed. I was shortly diagnosed with fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, chronic viral infections causing viral arthritis, Hashimoto’s thyroiditis (autoimmune hypothyroidism), Addison’s disease (low functioning adrenal glands, probably autoimmune), and a serotonin deficiency. I take a large number of bioidentical hormones, vitamins, and prescription pills, as seen above. The above picture is 1 day’s worth of pills for me. I have my blood tested every 4 months, when I can afford it, to check my levels of hormones, etc to see if my pills need to be adjusted.

I wear a medic alert bracelet every day, I have a collapsible cane when I’m having a bad flare, various braces, and heating pads to help with the pain. I don’t take any pain meds, they don’t work. I occasionally end up having to take a day off of work because I’ve done too much and I literally can’t get out of bed. I have to get 8 hours of sleep as many nights as I can, or else I get ill and flare up. Unfortunately, this can limit how much I can do sometimes. I’m usually pretty bad at saying no, and love doing as much as I can. Blogging, podcasting, and freelance voice work are all very illness-friendly tasks for me, which helps immensely.