PTSD, Fibromyalgia, High Blood Pressure and Nearsighted....Oh, My! Immortal?

By the time I hit college I had the insomnia and stress under control enough that my migraines were spaced about every 3 months and I knew most of my triggers. The stomach problems I'd had as a young teenager had backed off, and I wasn't living on or guzzling Mylanta or other antacids anymore and the nervous bowel/spastic colon diagnosis seemed to have gone away.

But then I started disassociating and dreaming horrible things that I only sort of remembered and went for long walks and talked it out with a good friend of mine.

 I finally ended up calling my sister to confirm if the memories that were coming back to me were true memories, or just really weird nightmares. They were true. I'd been sexually abused when I was a kid. By a family member. Not my father.

But my parents hadn't known how to deal with it, and I had never gotten treatment so I had a whopping case of PTSD. It broke my first year of college. So did my mind. I ended up with a bad case of Mononucleosis on top of trying to deal with starting school and having had to lose 40 pounds to be thin enough for the military weight charts so I could keep my full ride scholarship. I wasn't in a very good place when I was realizing what had happened. I confronted my Mom about it and all she could say was, "I didn't realize it had gone so far. Don't tell your Dad. It will kill him."

Wow.
 I never did. It had been hard enough to confront my Mother about why I hadn't gotten any help or counseling. So many things in my psyche started to make sense to me now.

 I took some psychology classes and talked to some friends. I wasn't really comfortable talking to strangers about things, I worked things out in my own ways and in my own times. I knew what my coping strategies and behaviors were and what I used as hiding behaviors. And damaged people who didn't trust recognized other damaged people pretty easy. It made me much more empathetic than I would have been otherwise, but it's something that never totally disappears.

 But the feeling that it is somehow the victim's fault, or that the victim is dirty...THAT goes away and THAT disappears over the years.

But my college time also had me dealing with high blood pressure and becoming nearsighted. They both hit at about the same time when I managed to hit a parked car. (Yeah, that was fun!) So the assumption was made that my eyesight was messed up BECAUSE of the high blood pressure. Oops! Nope. Not the cause. I'd been doing so much close up reading that my eyes didn't want to focus out farther anymore, so it was time for glasses AND high blood pressure medicine. LOL 

I knew biofeedback at this point, but I didn't meditate daily and I only used biofeedback during a migraine so I had no way of really coping with stress. I also had no real clue that the letdown of stress was a BIG migraine trigger for me. Notice I said TRIGGER not CAUSE. Migraines are a central nervous system DISEASE they are not caused by the things that might trigger an attack. Doctors don't know what the actual cause is currently. Not enough research has been done on this disease.

A year or two later I was afflicted with more of the back pain I had dealt with in middle school and high school. I initially had a gymnastics accident in gym class where my spotter didn't catch me on dismount off the horse and I came down on my neck, chin, and upper chest with my feet and legs curled over my head. That accident led to additional back problems throughout high school and college.  I spent almost an entire year in traction between the hospital and home traction on the living room floor to try and get my back spasms to calm down. That's where the TENS pack came into play

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But in college I added pain in my knees, ankles, wrists and elbows. My doctor was pretty sure I had rheumatoid arthritis. That possibility scared me to death. I knew a teenager who had been dealing with that. She was in constant agony...but that's what I was dealing with...so it seemed like it might be true.

This was back in the 1980's. I was maybe pretty lucky in that I was sent to a rheumatologist who had just been to a conference and read about fibromyalgia. He tested for RA, but he was positive I didn't have it. He diagnosed fibromyalgia and gave me a packet to read that was 1/4" thick. The upshot of the reading was basically...you're sick...you have a syndrome....we can diagnose it and do really nothing about it. LOL So gee, I was lucky enough to get a name for it and be diagnosed, but from that point on I was on my own with the pain. I was given Neurontin (gabapentin which is similar to lyrica) early in this process, and it did help me get things under control for a number of years. I came to discover that I was unusual (Gee, imagine that!) in that I would wake up feeling as good as I would feel all day and go steadily downhill from there. Whereas most people with fibro I guess feel better as they get to moving and exercising. (If you've never heard of "the spoon theory" check out this link!)

I was also prescribed physical therapy for ultrasound and heat wraps and they were to do movement studies on my body. I was told seriously that I had a wonderful range of motion, but that I made not one single move in the correct manner. LOL And then they never bothered to show me what the correct manner was! LOL THAT really irritated me! If I'm not doing it right, show me how to do it right!

But I was really busy trying to get through college and get on with life. I used all my old standby's: Ace wraps, creams, gels, asper crème, menthol, soaking salts, TENS, meditation, biofeedback, steam rooms, saunas, hot tubs. I even tried new stuff when I graduated and a friend of mine became a masseuse. She learned deep tissue massage and did rolfing. It would leave bruises for a day or two, but it would also clear out the muscle and tendon knots that seem to live around my joints and throughout my back and allowed me to take up belly dance as a hobby for the next 10 years. I managed to work up to where I was practicing 5 hours a week and dancing performances 2 or 3 times a month.

I had a great career as a Systems Network Project Manager in the computer industry and I loved it. I lead a small team of techs. My migraines were under control. My fibro was under control. I was diagnosed with Chronic Fatigue but I was kicking it because the Graves Disease my body threw itself into supercharged things. I was told I might have Gauillame Barr as well as the Eppstein Barr that had made my first year of college so intolerable and was getting me down with the fatigue. There were some sort of titers in my blood, but the infectious disease doctor didn't believe in it. So gee, I guess I wasn't sleeping all the hours that I wasn't at work then? Some doctors can be asinine.

 I was seeing the signs of carpal tunnel in both hands and thoracic outlet in my shoulders, but I was moving and happy and productive. After the Graves Disease triggered, my doctor used pills to burn my thyroid out because it was hard on my heart.

 I was an idiot and smoked and drank and partied, but I was young and immortal too. I even thought about joining the Navy Reserves at that point. But they still didn't like my Fibromyalgia any more than they had when I'd gotten the honorable discharge in 1981. LOL Migraines are Okay. Fibromyalgia is not. 

So you wonder why on top of this camel I just had to add another straw, huh? We're all immortal at 30 or so aren't we?

Tell it like it Is...

  From a family of diabetics, I started out a hypoglycemic. I spent many years of my childhood getting 5 hour glucose tolerance tests to find out just how badly hypoglycemic I was. (Bad.)  For those who haven't had the pleasure, you get a nice cup of glucose to drink in a minimal time, and if you are really unlucky they flavor it like a pop flavor you like. You will probably never drink that flavor pop again because the glucose is so sickeningly sweet it puts you off that sugared flavor for the rest of your life. (Orange and coke went away that way for me, until I got smart and just drank it straight.) Then your blood is taken at half hour and hour intervals for 5 hours and your other symptoms such as mania or sleepiness are noted.

I've been blessed with "classic migraines," since before my menses hit at 10. I think my first migraine hit at 8.  In that time of my family's past we were seeing a Osteopath for a doctor. He believed in "adjusting the neck," for migraine pain. Because of the pain and horror of those sessions and how they increased the pain in my neck I have refused to ever see a chiropractor and I would barely see my message therapist. I only went to her because she was a friend long before she learned to give massages.


I had some of the really scary vision effects and aura hit me in Middle School so by High School I was on a full preventative regimen and rescue drug; aspirin was where you started way back when, but when five at a time didn't help and you accidently gave yourself aspirin poisoning you moved to your own feverfew plant: cafergot, fiorecet, fiorinal, Inderal and other beta blockers all before I was 18 to try to control the pain as well as shots of Demerol and Phenergan in the ER to knock me out so that I could sleep through the piercing pain. I remember many trips with me whimpering and my face buried in my Dad's chest to block out light and sound and my knuckles clenched until they were fisted white.

None of this stopped me from playing sports full tilt hard enough to do permanent damage to my ankles that required surgical repair, and my back which made me the proud owner of one of the first TENS packs. (Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation) The unit looked like a big, blue plastic sticky cube with a battery on a Velcro belt that went around your body with the electrode (Yes, single.) being placed over the area of worst pain.

The newer units are about the size of a cigarette pack and hold a 9 volt battery and have 2 sets of electrical leads that plug into the top to attack to electrodes that you can stick quite a few places on your body. You can buy reusable electrodes that the leads connect into and adjust the strength of the pulse and the amplitude of the electrical wave. It works on the theory that it interferes with the pain signal sent through your nerves and so you don't feel it, and it works to a certain extent.  But I described it recently to my Internist as throwing a cup of water at a forest fire...when ALL the nerves there are sending signals and only SOME are interrupted it is only partially effective.

TENS unit with electrodes and wires

I've finally learned to tell it like it is in physical therapy, and with doctors. Its only taken me over 40 years to break my early training! LOL

For my other thoughts on current poisons some of which are colors you can see my other blog. But we are also given poisons as medicine. These things we just down on the doctor's say so. The supplements and vitamins we ingest as well. All are poisons in the wrong amounts. You can even poison yourself with too much water. So I'm pretty careful with how I keep track of what I use. I'm planning to write a blog post about it here and I'll link to it.