Surviving

It's been a rough couple of days here. Work has been busy for Chris. Finances are tight as the animals needed a ton of items replenished this week. I saved about 50$ with coupons though which helped. My immune system is up to no good. I've been noticing small things the past week or so layering on top of my recent extreme fatigue. Missing when I go to grab things, frequent stumbling, mixing up words, dropping things. While it's sparse and barely noticeable to anyone else, it all stands out like an emergency siren to me. Symptoms of my MS are generally rarer anymore unless there's a trigger like heat, and they've been increasing in frequency and severity all of the sudden. Last night when we went to the store I developed a bad tremor in my left hand while pushing the cart, and I stumbled about six times. Then I later developed spasticity in my right hip and it has yet to give me relief. I'm struggling with stairs, and limping when I walk. I'm hoping with some rest it will all calm down, but it's starting to look like it's adding up to a relapse. If it continues to get worse in severity I'll need to go see my neurologist and get on a solumedrol drip before I lose my ability to walk all together. As much as I hate solumedrol, I enjoy walking. I'm trying really hard to be optimistic that it's just a passing exacerbation from stress or whatever, but as the frequency and severity builds I'm soon going to have to be a realist.

A Fork in the ...Toe?

Oi have I been busy. My body's been going crazy for some reason. Getting sick probably riled up my immune system good. Rheumatoid and fibro have everything hurting. MS has my fine motor skills all screwed up, shocking nerve pain, tremors, balance issues, and some serious verbal vocabulary problems.

The insomnia isn't helping much either. When I do sleep I've been having such vivid nightmares that my screaming wakes Chris up, and he in turn wakes me up.

 

It's frustrating, but I'm doing the best I can to manage despite it. I've settled in to 10-15mgs of Prednisone a day again. That's been helping a great deal with symptom management, but I've been constantly starving in result.

I really need to go get lab work done sometime very soon. My JC virus testing is way past due. I haven't gotten my regular labs done for my rheumatologist in awhile, and my PCP has wanted some labs from me for awhile now.

Chris was off on Monday; it was also his pay day. I didn't really press to run errands though because I knew he's been feeling a bit run down since he's been sick. We didn't really have anything of urgent need either. We filled the gas tank, hit up the bank, grabbed some lunch and went home. Spent the day together playing video games and what not.

I've been super busy. Undecorating from Christmas, working on some little projects around the house, and a ton of fun stuff from the wedding is showing up. We got videos from my Uncle, pictures from the photographer, and a lot of memory keeping to do! The pictures are gorgeous. It's hard to decide what to put where.

Nerves

I've been diagnosed with a variety of auto-immune diseases/nonsense that causes an even bigger variety of issues. One of my main issues is pain.

I have all types of pain.

Muscle pain, nerve pain.

Honestly, I think the nerve pain is the worst. There's no massaging nerve pain to try to get some relief. It's really hard to find any way actually to soothe it. 

People often ask me to explain how it feels, and the best relatable way I can explain nerve pain is by comparing it to a toothache. In reality, a toothache is nerve pain. When a tooth hurts it's generally because a nerve is damaged, exposed, or having pressure put on it by your sinuses.

Because of multiple sclerosis many of my nerves are damaged and stripped of their protective coating, leaving them much like an exposed nerve of a tooth.

Think about how well your TV or charger works after a pet chews on the cord and exposes the wiring.

The nerves start to misfire causing a myriad of issues, and pain. I get nerve pain from other things too, like fibromyalgia and erythromelalgia. Sometime's it's hard to tell what's causing the pain.

My neurologist put me on Cymbalta which so far has made one of the most noticeable differences in quality of life compared to any other treatments. I started on 30mgs and am up to 90mgs. My new rheumatologist at Jefferson is considering adding Lyrica in the future. Cymbalta has drastically cut down on my nerve pain.

Do you suffer from nerve pain? What gives you relief? What analogy do you use to explain your pain to others?

Long time, no blog!

It has been quite some time since I posted a blog. I just recently realized how much I missed it, and what a tool it could be for reaching out to others. Life has changed a great deal since I last blogged. While I won't recap the past two years in a long daunting post, I'll give you the highlights, and work some of the details in in bits and pieces of future posts.

I've been diagnosed with an asinine immune system. Okay, so that's not really a diagnosis, but it's the basic gist. After a ton of trial and error with treatments and a near death experience I'm going to Jefferson University Hospital now to work on figuring things out.

 Current diagnosis is Multiple Sclerosis and Rheumatoid Arthritis.

The MS diagnosis made a lot of weird things my body was doing finally make sense. My brain is a hot mess. At least now that I know why certain things are happening I can cope with them more appropriately. I plan on sharing my battle with chronic illness in intimate detail with you all in hopes of connecting with others going through it.

My weekly nightmare of filling meds!

In happy and exciting news, I'm engaged!

I know, I can hardly believe it either. Haha. I'm getting married in less than a month.

Crunch time is on. I'm actually going for my billionth dress fitting in a few hours.

Hard to believe I get to marry this sexy beast, if he doesn't murder me later for using this picture.

Another addition to our little family is a cat we adopted, Tux. My fiance is a cat person and Daisy's vet was fostering him. One thing led to another, and now I have a biscuit maker in my house. He is rather adorable though.

And a bit crazy, but he fits in well. I thought I was extremely clever when I named him Tux. Turns out he's actually a Tuxedo cat. Not so clever, but still fitting.

Daisy is as adorable and spoiled as ever. She's quite in love with the cat. They have regular hardcore wrestling matches in the kitchen.

So, there's a taste of what's going on in my life and what you can expect to be reading about in the future. For now, I'm going to curl back up with this incredibly hot man that I somehow have in my bed and my furry family for a few extra minutes of shut eye before I have to go play dress up.