October 11th, 2006
I have that on the best authority. Honest.
The Rheumy’s nurse called and said the MRI came back that my brain looks to be functioning normal. – So, no, BJ, no “Brain Cloud”. :P (Kudo’s to anyone who gets the movie reference and posts it in the comments.)
That doesn’t explain the “brainfog” of course, but it does at least eliminate things like tumors and brain injuries and big brain malfunctions.
In the meantime, today is a particularly difficult day for me. I woke up with my legs hurting like I’d been running all night. My arms ached too. As the day has progressed the pain in my arms has gotten worse and stretched down from upper arms into my hands, particularly my left hand, making it difficult to control what my left hand is doing — typing, etc. Plus, my back and neck are now also aching. I could take Tylenol but it doesn’t seem to do anything on it’s own and the Kidney Specialist said no more Alleve before the biopsy.
I’m really not sure how to cope with the increasing pain without relief for the next week and a half. I wish my parents were here to see it though. I was feeling mostly fine, just a little fatigued while they were here. It’s kind of like taking your car to the garage because it’s making a noise that it only makes when it’s not at the garage. My dad never gets to see me when I’m really sick and so I don’t think he believes me. Then again, I don’t think he believes anyone when they have an illness he can’t physically see. He’s one of those “suck it up” kind of guys.
Tags: MRI of the brain, fatigue, muscle pain
October 6th, 2006
Okie…I feel like I’ve been through the ringer the last 36 hours, but I at least have a final-ish schedule for all of those tests and procedures that seemed jumbled up into one week or as my boss put it — “Looks like your taking a full sampling of all that [our hospital] has to offer…” (I’m going to be visiting all three of the big complexes.) 
Anyway, for those who are keeping track (and I hope someone is for me :P), the brain MRI is on Monday morning, the CT of the lung/chest is next Friday afternoon, and they have kindly scheduled the kidney biopsy/hospital stay for Oct 19th-20th so my mom can be here to spoil me and the grand-pets and she can still be home to celebrate my dad’s big 65th birthday next Tuesday.
Hopefully something will come out of this, even if it’s an elimination of possible diagnoses. I had a long session with my shrink last night and she reminded me that this is really about “data gathering”. It’s important to gather as much data about what’s going on in my malfunctioning body so we can determine what’s wrong and start either working on the cure or at least working on making life livable.
Really, I just want to get to the diagnosis part so I can get to a treatment part. If I just had a remote with a fast forward button for my life…
For someone who relies heavily on routines to cope with life, all of this erratic testing is stressing me out. :P It’s bad enough that people keep rearranging my weekly work meetings, but all of this sudden running over to the hospital for bloodwork and changes in my schedule due to doctors appointments are really throwing me off. Seriously, I need a personal assistant to keep track of everything. :P Writing everything down and keeping them in my Palm Pilot isn’t enough. I need a “Nag.”
Preferably one who vacuums and changes the litterbox.
Tags: wellness, kidney biopsy, CT Scan of the Lung w/ contrast, MRI of the brain, Nag, personal assistant, diagnosis
October 2nd, 2006
I have just spent 10 days with family, which means that pretty much except when I was asleep, I was interacting with people without a break.
What that really means is that there were witnesses to my increasing “brainfog” as I call it.
It’s been kind of easy to hide it at work by simply staying mostly in my cubicle and since I don’t actually have a social life, I haven’t really had to face it outside of work.
But the final straw for me came yesterday when I nearly started crying in frustration when it took me a few minutes to describe what a “clothes rod” was — that long metal tube thing in the closet that you hang clothes on – to my mother because I couldn’t think of the word “rod” half way through the sentence. It’s such a simple, every day word and there are so many simple every day words and I’ll be talking along and suddenly it’s as if they’re just gone from my mind, out of reach, vanished. It’s like walking into a room and forgetting why, except that I do that a hundred times a day with words when I’m writing or talking. I’ll just be typing or talking or thinking along and just stop in mid-sentence.
And there was my mother trying to guess what word was supposed to come next like it was a game show…what word logically would come next and I’m saying, “no….no…no…” and my tone is getting more and more frustrated as I’m frantically trying to find the word and then trying to find the right words just to describe the simple word I can’t remember — that long metal tube thing in the closet that you hang clothes on. And I was truly on the verge of tears because I knew this was something everyone knows. I felt stupid and angry and helpless.
Later that day, when I took my parents to dinner at The Outback for an early celebration of my father’s 65th birthday, they handed me the check and all I had to do was figure out the tip and total and sign my name. For a math minor and computer science major, someone who wrote computer programs in her head for fun and aced college accounting because she thought it was enjoyable, figuring out the tip and total should take seconds…right?
Except there I was staring at that little piece of white paper with the gray-black print and those four numbers and their decimal in the middle and they just looked like a jumble to me. I was frustrated again and I tried to explain as I tried to find paper to do the math on. My CPA father thought it was amusing as he did it in his head, but my mother had the courtesy to say she was starting to be worried about me.
For me, it was kind of a wake up call…having witnesses. It was scary.
It’s one thing for my body to betray me but my mind is something I’ve always prided myself on. Thinking about it, I began to realize that these sort of things have been going on a while and getting more and more frequent, but I’ve been trying to ignore them, hide them, pretend everything up there was o.k.
So, after some talk with my doctors this morning, they me for a MRI of my brain next Monday. This of course also means more blood work too.
Tags: MRI of the brain, brainfog, wellness
