Some Time in the Hospital, a New Diagnosis, and a Tor.com shout for Field Guide to the End of the World
First of all, thanks to Abby Murray and Lish McBride for writing up Field Guide to the End of the World for this feature on Tor.com! This was a bright spot in an otherwise challenging week
I spent the last three days admitted into a hospital – after a week of repeated trips to the ER, collapsing with dehydration and fainting and cyclical vomiting – hooked up to IVs, getting lots of MRIs (three!) and giving lots of blood. Before that, I’ve had over a month of very strange symptoms – dizziness, nausea, vomiting, inability to keep down food, and strange heavy feeling in my lower legs, with wobbliness and my knees giving out. At the hospital I had a neurologist specialist work me up along with the hospitalist (along with, among others, a nutritionist, an occupational therapist, and a physical therapist.) It should be said here vomiting is one of my most hated things in life and the other is being hooked up to a damn IV. Even at a very nice hospital with private rooms and big televisions and pretty surroundings, like Swedish Issaquah, no one loves being in the hospital.
Several different radiologists and neurologists have decided my symptoms, combined with a rather devastating new MRI of my brain, mean I have probable MS. This has qualified me to be worked up at the best MS Center in Seattle with one of their top doctors. (If these doctors hadn’t interceded for me, there’s almost no way I would have made it in with their doc within two weeks notice.)
A Year After I Received a Terminal Cancer Diagnosis, I’ve Received a Positive MS Diagnosis.
A year and a half after I received a terminal cancer diagnosis at an ER in Redmond, I’ve discovered that my neural lesions, which had been watched for over five years and stayed pretty static, had changed, grown, spread, and generally developed a pattern that looked a lot to the neurologist and radiologist like MS. (The medical terminology is “McDonald’s criteria.”) Because I cannot have a spinal tap – the usual way to get a diagnosis – my diagnosis has been slow to come, even as I developed more lesions and more symptoms. This latest weirdness has been termed an official “MS flare,” which typically last thirty days and bring lots of symptoms on to the unwary MS sufferer.
MS is not as scary a diagnosis as terminal cancer, and MS is treatable – though we don’t know yet what kind of treatment will work for me. Currently I’m on a giant cocktail of meds to get me through the time when the MS specialists will decide what the best treatment for me is (because of my other health conditions, they didn’t want to do the usual throw a huge dose of steroids treatment at me. Though I might have welcomed it!) My brother came to visit me in the hospital, and my parents flew out to Ohio to help Glenn as right now I am termed a “fall risk” and can’t be left alone even if I wanted to be. Getting out of a chair or taking a shower have become huge difficult challenges for me all of a sudden.
Anyway, it’s been more than a month since I could focus on being a friend, a writer, or even a decent human being, so I apologize – – but just trying to survive the constant vomiting – along with a huge decrease in my ability to walk or even stand unaided – has been a real bear. I hope that the new cocktail of drugs will work until they can get me under a more stable treatment plan. Think good thoughts for me as I am dealing with a new reality. I said to a friend that MS wouldn’t even be the scariest thing – or the thing most likely to lead to be death – that I’ve been diagnosed with. But it is still a challenge as I learn the new reality of my body, which constantly morphs. Like Buffy, you learn to defend yourself against one monster one week, and the next week, another pops up and you start all over again,
