March 19, 2012
Today has been one crazy day. I woke up in the middle of the night last night with an unbelievable sense that I needed to vomit, but I was extremely tired, so I rolled back over and went to sleep.
I swear that is what happened, but I can’t remember for certain because it feels like it might have been a dream.
I’m just not sure.
I woke up this morning with this nagging abdominal pain, and I contemplated going to the ER for it. I literally thought, “Wow, I haven’t been to the hospital in awhile. Maybe I should go.”
Now to be fair to myself, this abdominal pain has been coming and going for the past several weeks, probably a month or longer. I truly can’t remember for certain, but it’s been a long time and it’s just gotten to be horrible. Not because it’s excruciating, but because it’s continuous and random.
It’s so freaking frustrating to the point of where you would love to cut your abdomen open with a butter knife and dig around in that spot to take whatever it is that’s causing it out.
I’ve never had a toothache, but I’m really certain it would be like that. This deep throbbing, aching pain.
SO to have that continuously happen and then to awaken from a dead sleep with extreme nausea, well, I thought maybe today would be a good day to spend at the ER….but I didn’t go.
No, I couldn’t bring myself to spend at least 3 hours or more sitting in an uncomfortable, being prodded with needles to only be told, “we can’t figure out the problem. You aren’t dying, so here’s some pain meds. Follow up with your doctor tomorrow and come back if it gets worse.”
Instead, I decided to WALK to a nearby park with my 6 month old puppy and 3 year old daughter. The park is only a mile away or just over, but it seemed to be 3 or 4 miles at least. My daughter loved it. The puppy actually loved it, and I felt proud of myself for doing it. And then I made it back home and crashed for an hour before I had to leave for work.
Here’s the thing..this was a really crazy thing to do. I mean I didn’t feel well, and my poor puppy literally plopped on to the ground and refused to walk further about a block into the walk, so I had to start carrying her. She’s pretty small, maybe 6 pounds. I carried her for about a block but then my hand and arm started cramping.
It started as a dull ache and it built to this fairly excruciating pain. My arm became stiff and sore. The cramping became intense to the point that I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to extend my arm. The same type of feeling was moving through my hips and right leg as well.
I wondered if it is all related. Is the abdominal pain, the nausea, the cramping all being caused by the same problem? I’ve had the cramping in my hands and feet for months now, but this is becoming a daily problem, and it’s becoming so severe that I wonder what I’m going to do in the future. How am I going to get past this?
So if you add this to the abdominal pain, the ER sounded like the right call this morning, but I didn’t go.
I’m certain that none of the doctors in that are in the local hospitals will be able to figure this out. I don’t know if it’s related to EPM. I don’t know if it’s related to one of my autoimmune issues. I don’t know if it’s purely random.
The only thing I do know is that this these issues are not getting better. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I don’t know how I’m going to live past it.
I guess it’s like everything else. You do it one step at a time.
It’s just like the walk I went on this afternoon. I was very much like my poor puppy. By the time we got to the end of the parking lot, my hips were cramping. By the time we got a block away, I felt like I could join the puppy, sprawled on the sidewalk, four legs to four corners and wait for someone to come and pick us up. I actually contemplated calling a friend to come and get us, but I kept saying to myself, “we’re almost there. we can do this.”
We didn’t make record time, but that’s okay. It wasn’t a race. Eventually, we’ll get to where we’re going. It’s all a matter of putting one foot in front of the other, and when things suddenly start to get more difficult, we keep on going because we can.
Don’t worry if you start to lag behind a little. I’ll walk beside you.
Hyponatremia and Central Pontine Myelinolysis 