I am no longer allowed to play an at home doctor, not even on television, as apparently in failing to call for emergency assistance last Monday when I had the severe autonomic crisis and then treating the symptoms myself I could have very well suppressed my respirations to a point that when I finally fell asleep my brain could have "forgotten" to breathe. I had not considered the fact that all of the medications I took to treat the symptoms - pain medication, anti-nausea metication, medcations for spasms in my muscles- have the potential to suppress respitations in a normal and healthy body not to mention in a body in the midst of a hypotensive crisis. Have I mentioned that during these crises my thinking becomes a bit murky and not the most logical, probably because with a blood pressure at or below 80/40 the amount of oxygen reaching my brain drops a bit. My neurologist, my amazing and wonderful and incredibe doctor, pointed out my incredible stupidity to me, and in a very nice way. So now we have a plan for how to deal with these episodes and I have in writing a very basic procedure for any emergency care physician to follow should I need to call for emergency assistance. One of the reasons I did not call 911 was because I know that at the local hospital they have never treated anyone like me and I did not feel good enough to talk them through how to do so without killling me off. It is difficult being so complicated.
I also got in trouble for stopping a medication without permission because unbeknownst to me it is also used to regulate blood pressure in people with dysautonomia (that is not why I was started on it or was taking it) and so I was informed I am not to self adjust my medications anymore without explicit physician permission. Oops. Lets see, I also learned that it could take weeks to recover from that big crisis which may explain why I have been so fatigued, so much weaker, why the spasms have been worse, why I have been so nauseous again, and why I have had no appetite (although that does not seem to be slowing down the annoying weight gain - ugh!!). And that is as long as I do not have any more episodes - which I already had an average one last night that I treated appropriately where my blood pressure dropped to 90/38 and stayed in that range for about 3 hours. I pushed fluids, laid down, and monitored it with the plan in mind to call for help if I felt worse at any point. At no point did I feel like I was losing consciousness so it was not a horrid one.
We are also going to do pulmonary function tests since I have been more short of breath since the crisis, and it appears based on the asthma meter given to me in the hospital last December my lungs never returned to full function after that hospitalization. I do not have asthma, but my diaphragm was impacted by the severe muscle weakness. Other than that we are awaiting the results of genetic testing, I see the top specialist in the progressive spastic paraplegia in December, and after that visit I regroup with my nerologist who mentioned a possible assessment at an MDA clinic if we do not get a firm diagnosis from the PSP.
Today I go get my wheelchair, in just a few minutes we leave and I am very excited. Oh, and I also have to restart physical therapy because my legs are too tight - I can not straighten my knees anymore which makes standing hard and walking any steps harder because I rely on locking my joints for stability to walk.
I will update with info on my new chair and hopefully pictures later. I am such a dork excited about my wheelchair!

After almost four months of anticipation and negotiation, my as yet to be named wheelchair has arrived! From conception way back in July to delivery this Friday it will have been fourteen weeks of awaiting the gestation and arrival of this metallic bundle of delight. There were times I thought she would never emerge from the womb of durable medical equipment and times I thought I would never see her gleaming purple body, but now she is in the main office of the medical supply company and awaiting delivery to my eager arms on Friday morning. I may shed tears of joy when I first see her, let alone when we take our first spin together. I am certain we shall be the best of friends and she will be come a priceless treasure to my independence and mobility. Now I just need to think of a name for her. While I will not be sending out birth announcements (it seems a bit too quirky even for me), I do have a personality hiccup that causes me to name inanimate objects. My coffee maker is Klaus Keurig, my teapot Gretel the Kettle, my iPod is Serenity, my cell phone is Violet, my laptop is Elphalba, my digital camera is Celeste, and my Car has an assortment of names depending upon its behavior but the most frequently used one is Figment. I find this naming of objects perfectly normal and have done it most, if not all, of my life and happen to know for a fact that I am not the only person who engages in this habit. I am just so excited to finally have my wheelchair and know that on Friday she is mine, all mine!!! Pictures will follow upon delivery!!!

I was thinking, which tends to lead me to no good, and I realized that there are some benefits to relying upon a wheelchair for mobility. Hence the creation of the list below. I am sure it will grow with time.

* You can never be accused of looking down on someone.
*You never have to worry about finding a seat.
*There are no speed limits for wheelchairs.
* Wheelchairs are eco-friendly so you are reducing your carbon "footprint" to a carbon treadmark.
* You can totally skip the long lines at airport security.
* If you so desire, you can pick a fight with just about anyone safely because no one with self respect is going to take a shot at a gimp.
* People are so impressed that you can maneuver your wheelchair that should you actually say something even halfway intelligent it renders them astonished and amazed.
* A pair of shoes never gets "worn out" seeing as they serve a primarily decorative function.
* Chivalry is revived as people rush to hold doors open for you.
* Wheelchair skiing reduces the height of the fall and what's the worst that could happen - you end up in a wheelchair?
* Two words: Wheelchair Arms.
* You are at the perfect height to check out hind ends that happen to end up in your face.
* Life is an extreme sport, and racing downhill on an open road is like street luge.

It was a cold and foggy morning, just before the sun would begin to ascend in the sky and start to slowly burn away the misty vapor that encompassed everything in a murky haze. While neighbors slept soundly in their warm beds, completely unaware of what was lurking in the dark fog, creeping ever nearer to my home. By the unholy hour of seven o'clock in the morning, before the sun's rays had struck over the horizon and as the darkness continued to cling to the cold blanket of foggy mist a rattling tapping was heard on my metal screen door. I knew it had come for me. Through the darkness, the fog, and the unholy hour it came and my defenses were not strong enough to even attempt a counter attack. With a groan and a deep breath, I flung open the heavy metal interior door to reveal one perky vampire dressed in Old Navy Fleece standing outside my door. Vampires should never be perky, let alone at seven o'clock in the morning but apparently she had not read the Vampire Handbook. This might explain why she was eagerly working as dawn approached instead of in the full coverage of the darkness of night - she had not yet read the fine print of her alternative lifestyle. I invited her in, since everyone knows a vampire can not enter a dwelling without an invitation from a living human being who does not seek blood for a living. Her hands were as cold as ice as she decided which vein in my arm would provide the best access for the snack sized tubes of blood that she needed to collect to ship off to the central laboratory for investigation into my human genetic structure. I think perhaps one small tube is saved and allowed to age like fine wine for taste testings much as we perform wine testings. As she slid the gardenhone, um needle, into my arm I think I caught a flash of fang glimmering in her grin as she watched my blood quickly fill up the tubes. Ruthless vampires. With a square of gauze and a bandaid, guaranteed to cause a rash as I am as allergic to medical adhesives as vampires are to garlic, she was finished. So now my blood will be intrusted to the vampire couriers of FedEx and I can go back to sleep for a while since it is still dark outside! The results of the genetic testing on the blood collected will more than likely take a while, as the nerds try to separate out the specificly identified genetic markers to see if I possess any of them, and I am just thankful that the sphincters at the insurance company have agreed that these highly expensive tests are indeed covered and medically necessary. Vampires and nerds and Sphincters, Oh My!

Last night the dysautonomia decided to remind me just how much power it possesses over my ability to function at the most basic of levels. I had one of my most severe "crashes" in recent memory, and most dramatic in terms of onset. The headache had been nagging at me for a while, but given that I have horrendous migraines that without high dose medication would be a daily torment I did not pay much attention to it. It did not even warrant tylenol let alone my pain medication. Then my temperature regulation went haywire, but that was easy to accommodate by changing into a summer shirt and boxer shorts. I was laying in bed listening to music and relaxing when in under a minute my body crashed. My headache escalated from a tolerable "2-3" on that stupid pain scale to a torturous "7-8", I became intensely nauseous, my vision began to fade out as my body prepared to lose consciousness, and I began to violently tremor. I had to fight through the head spinning, vision fading near unconsciousness to turn off the music that had become torture, to go get my blue barf bucket, and to grab an ice pack and water bottle. Those were the longest two minutes. Then all I could do was force down a double dose of antinausea medication and my pain medication, try (and fail) to eat something with salt to help bring up my blood pressure, sip on water, and lay absolutely flat and still while praying desperately. I could not sit up without the risk of losing consciousness, I could not move without risking vomiting violently (and then losing the medication I had struggled to get in to me), and my lower extremeties felt as if they weighed three times more than normal. I was hot and tremoring primarily in my legs. In other words for a good two hours I was miserable. Then finally the medication and liquids and laying flat and still all caught up and I managed to fall asleep. This morning I still have a bit of a headache, am exhausted, and my legs are sore but I am feeling so much better than last night. I hate these reminders of just how powerful this monster is and how it can take me from feeling decent to feeling dangerously awful in no time at all. With little to no warning it can shut down my body and hold me prisoner until it decides to release me. I have to just keep on living, because I refuse to live in fear of this monster, but it is like living with a shadow over at least a part of you or a nagging awareness that at any moment even the best day could crash down around you. This is my monster, and we are inseperable until a cure is found, so we face the world together - and sometimes he behaves and sometimes he rages but never do I surrender to him and let him live my life.

It is pretty rare for a movie to hold my attention from beginning to end and actually have characters that I relate to on a personal level. This is especially true after the past year of dealing with this illness and growing to detest most of television and movies after spending hour upon countless hour too sick to do anything other than half watch the glowing box of mind numbing pointlessness. So when I write that I watched a movie today from beginning to end, and even paused it when I needed to answer the phone or force myself to drink something, that is saying something very powerful about the movie. I watched "The Cake Eaters", a movie I had never heard of before comng across it on Showtime. It is about a teenage girl with Friedreich's Ataxia, which they portray as a terminal illness. She is basically used as a tool for her mother (who can not see her as anything more than her disease) to gain attention as an artist, she is an outsider because to her healthy peers she is a "freak", and she wants to find someone to have sex with her before she dies because she is certain no one could ever love her. I am doing the movie an injustice in condensing it this way, but trying to summarize the emotional plot is difficult. I could completely relate to the girl in the movie because I have felt my entire life like "an other", and for years like I was somehow "less than" because I was born with a body that did not work according to factory specifications. I remember those years as a teenager wanting desperately and working so hard to hide the differences, the toll it took fighting to not allow anyone to see more of the monsters in my life than was absolutely mandatory. I have also felt like at times people have used me as a prop to garnish attention for themselves or been unable to see me as anything other than my disability. That feeling of exploitation, of being made inhuman and into nothing more than a diagnosis is something you never forget and that you rage against even if you rage silently inside. Most of all I related to her fears of never knowing love and not having enough time in life. I am all too aware that it is going to require someone beyond the definition of incredible to be willing to risk loving me, to see beyond all of the brokenness to see the whole person that I am beneath the surface, and to choose to enter the chaos that is my life. Whether or not such a creature exists is a puzzle to me.
Yet my biggest relation to the film was the sense of urgency, the sense of needing to live now because time seemed to be so elusive and so flimsy, like a vapor fading in the sunrise. I have a relatively creative and imaginative spirit, and I can see the possibilities where others see only the impossible. So it has always been frightening to me that in my own life I am unable to imagine myself growing old. I want to imagine it, I want to spread out my life like a time line and laugh at the little old lady with gray curly hair sitting in her rocking chair but I don't see her. When I think of my life and imagine it, when I dream of the future, it all becomes a haze around middle age and I can go no further. It is truly impossible for me to imagine growing old. This creates a sense of urgency in my own life, the need to live in every moment and to not waste this gift of life on the inconsequential things because I too can not sense a life that stretches into enough tomorrows to feel comfortable. I probably sound morbid and overly dramatic, like I am trying to work this thing for all I can, but anyone who knows me knows that I very rarely reveal anything other than the lighter side of this journey. I protect those that I love from the harder aspects, from the monsters that sometimes torment me at night and the harsh realities that have settled into the core of my being years and years ago. I don't waste time feeling sorry for myself too often because that is time I can not get back, and that time is a precious commodity. I am just processing all of these thoughts and emotions that arose from this amazing movie and seeing so much of what I have experienced - in terms of emotions and such- portrayed so incredibly. When I go to sleep tonight and dream of any countless dreams, I wish it would be dreams of growing old and rocking chairs and gray hairs. I wish I could even just imagine.