Man – the medical problems

I have said in a few posts now that I would explain “the medical problems” when I got a chance. I suppose that if I don’t do it now, I never will so here it goes.. Keeping in mind that I am compressing 4 years of crap into a one page post so I will be glazing over a bunch of the details.

What the heck happened?

My wife and I had always had our share of problems and we laughed them off as they came. For example, when my kid was 2 months old my wife fell and broke both elbows. Let me tell you that when a spouse breaks both arms at the elbow, you get closer to them than you ever wanted to be.

I fed all 3 of us, bathed all 3 of us and was on diaper\bathroom detail for all 3 of us. And when my wife says “we breast fed our kid”, she actually does mean WE.. I had to help with that too and as far as I know, the ‘nipple nazis’ in the hospital still tell stories about us when discussing how important breast feeding is :-D

When my kid was 2, I got kidney stones for the first time and had to have the ‘go get them’ surgery. Not to bore you with the details, I will just say the word urethrascope and let you use your imagination.

Even with those problems, we were still in almost inappropriately good spirits.

About a year after that though, is when ‘the medical problems’ began and they were very hard to smile through. I woke up with kidney stone pain on the same side I had stones before and went to the ER again. After a CT scan, they told me that I didn’t have any stones on the right side so the pain must be something else. Thus began the land slide.

During the next 3 years, I had:

• 6 nerve surgeries on my back
• physical therapy
• 6 CT scans
• an MRI
• a bone density scan
• bone marrow biopsies
• pain management doctors
• passed one stone I had on the left side
• had surgery for another stone on the left side
• had shingles about 4 times
• 2 colonoscopies (I am only 33 for goodness sakes)
• About 8 ER trips for pain
• And a bunch more things I can’t even remember.

Each time I went to the ER, they found some other weird crud for me to add to the list. This or that would be bad which would spur more tests and worries. We went from thinking it was kidney stones all the way through leukemia to lupus and then to neuropathy (pain in your nerves for no reason).

I went from 170 pounds to probably 200 more than that, from having no debt to ridiculous amounts and from being a workaholic to barely able to function. Medication wise, I went from viccodin all the way up to oxycontin to control the pain.

The Results: Eventually, I just asked my doctors if they thought whatever was going on was going to kill me any time soon. When they said no, I told them all to jump off a cliff and began ignoring the pain and putting our life back together. I have been doing that for about a year and am making some progress with losing the weight and have dropped all pain and numbing medications. I’ll get there.

There are a lot of things during that time that I am proud of. For example, I worked from home so I never missed a day of work, I never took the pain meds when I didn’t need them and I fought my way from oxy (oral morphine!) back down to excedrin simply because I got pissed enough.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of things I am not proud of too. In another post, I mentioned that I felt like I let this journey break me. I can almost pinpoint the moment it happened too. It was when I had everything taken away from me except my wife and child and my doctors began talking about my pain maybe being skeletal\bone cancer. They told me I wouldn’t be able to pick up my toddler any more and shouldn’t run or do anything else that might aggravate my body.

At one of the lowest points in my life I felt like someone was trying to move me out of the picture little by little. Then when I had almost nothing left, ‘they’ started taking my family from me as well which was more than I was prepared to handle.

It was at that point that I just gave up completely. I won’t tell you what life-changing moment I had since that is probably the only deeply personal subject I keep to myself but I can tell you what it was like afterwards.

I made my first rule of my new life. “God will never give you more than you can handle but the bible doesn’t say you have to handle it yourself”. I had always had God in my life but before this moment, I had prayed for him to help take care of my family – not me. Also, though my wife helped me without ever being asked, I learned to ask for her help when I needed it.

I also came to grips with my second rule. God doesn’t cause the pain in our lives but if you let him, He can use that pain for His purposes. It really helps to know that, with your cooperation, what you’re going through isn’t for no reason. That being said, God is big enough to handle it when you get upset so it is ok to say ‘this sucks’. He understands what is in your heart.

It is my belief that I may never know what good will come from my trials. It could be that 2 years from now, someone finds this post on the net and one sentence is the exact one they need to hear at that time. I don’t spend any more time wondering why it all happened because I trust that some good has already come from it and God’s plans are much greater than I can understand.

Even though in the big picture I may never know the answers, I have learned to take the good out of what happened. I realize that I didn’t get beat by this and I feel like I have survived a threat to my life even if that threat didn’t turn out to be a medical one in the end (that I know of). I am not scared of failing, dying or living any more and my ability to get upset by little things is now broken. I find myself taking less pictures than I used to.. I don’t want to look at photos to reminisce because now I bask in every Kodak moment and remember every second I have with my wife and daughter.

During my bad times, I was most upset that for half of my child’s life, I was hurting, having surgery or on medication. Now I realize when you’re seven, 4 years is a huge chunk of time. If I am around 23 good years until she is 30, 4 bad years will hardly be remembered.

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That normally would have been the end of my post but I wanted to add the following. If not for my wonderful wife, I wouldn’t have made it. With her broken arms, I helped her and kept her from having to call someone else but that was 6 weeks. My wife stood by me for 3 years of CRAP and 1 year of recovery so far and I would like to publicly thank her like I try to do privately every day.

I love you babe and thank God for sending me you.