Burdens – Part 1 of a 3 Part Series

*Preliminary note – this ends well.*

So if there is one lesson I want you to take from today’s post, it is this.  If you go to the doctor, and the check-in nurse wants to take your blood pressure on an arm where you had blood drawn 48 hours ago (and you had blood drawn from both arms), and you hear a niggling little voice in the back of your head that says “Ask if you can skip the blood pressure cuff today,” and you hear another little voice that says “Nah, it’s probably fine, I’m sure the stick has healed after 48 hours” – LISTEN TO THE SECOND VOICE.  This comes from a girl with a bruise from her wrist to her upper arm, a very painful bruise that makes it hard to bend her elbow.  In fact, the bruise is pretty light, and I feel it does not nearly do justice to the extreme amount of pain that it is causing.  Carrying my babies SUCKS right now.

So here is how this begins: I’ve been suffering from a long string of illnesses lately.  One after another after another.  I remember saying to someone last term – I used to be tougher than this!  What is happening to me?  Why am I catching everything under the sun?  I’ve also been extremely exhausted.  Falling asleep on the couch all the time.  Cold, and unable to get warm.  In seemingly unrelated news, after performing an oral argument for 13 minutes the other day, my voice was extremely hoarse.  In fact, thinking back now on every performance I ever made with the band, I remember that my voice would go hoarse by the end and I’d usually have trouble squawking through the big finale without coughing or squeaking the high notes.  In other unrelated news, I had, if you recall, major shortness of breath issues during my pregnancy, issues that nearly drove me crazy.

These things were all fairly easily explained.  I presumed the hoarseness came from trying to overpower the amp, the cough from the smoky bar (they weren’t all smoky, but maybe it was cumulative secondhand smoke inhalation).  I presumed the illnesses came from having a son in his first year of preschool who is very good at sharing his classmates’ germs.  I’ve always been a chilly person – chalk it up to bad circulation.  I presumed the exhaustion and sleeping on the couch came from The Children.  Of course I’m sleepy.  I haven’t slept through the night regularly in about a year.  The breathlessness was weird, but it’s largely gone away since then.  None of this seemed to form a pattern that implicated some sort of overarching disease.

But ah, then the final symptom arrived, the one that had me googling multiple sclerosis (we’re watching The West Wing right now, so it was on my mind), and then consulting Web MD to play with the symptom checker thing and try to diagnose myself.  I have been working out pretty hard twice a week for the past few weeks, and at the end of each workout instead of feeling the pleasant pain of muscles and bones that have been working hard and getting stronger, I’ve felt like I had the flu.  Major, major body aches, joint pain, and a really sore neck – again, like I was coming down with the flu, though the flu never came and the pain never went.  I wondered if I was just getting old, but it was pronounced enough that I thought I’d better just go ask my doctor to have a look see.

The doctor agreed with me – that likely I was suffering from Law School Stress + Small Children + Sleep Deprivation, and these three things were wearing my body out so that I did have some sort of sustained flu.  But I asked her to run some routine blood tests, just to make sure I wasn’t dying of some weird disease, and once we ruled out Some Weird Disease I could go back to being miserable and cursing the day I decided to procreate and attend law school at the same time.

Well, the day after the first round of tests, I got an email saying I’d shown some abnormalities in my levels of X, Y, and Z, and that I needed a follow up lab.  She offered to meet me to discuss what it could be, but I said not to worry about it, that I’d come in after the second round of results came through.  I allowed my curiosity to rule me for a moment – never a good idea – and consulted Dr. Google to see what elevated levels of X, Y, and Z could be.  And the thing that kept coming up was pancreatic cancer, so I immediately shut that down and tried not to think about it til my follow up labs came through.

Two days ago, I got an email from the doc.  I took a deep breath and opened the message.  And voila!  Just like Lutz from 30 Rock, I have a “gland thing.”  It’s an autoimmune disease the prevents a certain little gland from working properly, and the symptoms are: hoarse voice, extreme sleepiness, exhaustion, depressed immune system, breathlessness, sensitivity to cold, and a couple of other things (including depression and inability to lose weight . . .)  My mother has this same thing – has had it since she was about my age.  I have to take a pill every morning for the rest of my life, but the prescription costs $4 a month at Wal Mart.  I can handle that!

It will take a month or two for them to normalize my dose, but the doctor says I should start to feel relief in a couple of weeks.  Sitting here with my neck aching something fierce, I gotta say I’m glad there is a problem here with a simple solution, instead of just generic stress misery.  She says that judging by the levels of what-have-you and this-and-that in my blood, I’ve had this for a long while.  Perhaps years.  My immune system has been compensating for a long time, but has finally lost its ability to manage this gland issue and also manage to, you know, keep me immune from things.  The little engine that could now can’t anymore.  But all it takes is one tiny pill per day to restart the train and get me rolling again!

I’ve taken some dramatic license in the telling of this – because that makes my health issue marginally  more interesting (am I really at the age where my health is a big topic of conversation?) – but it really all occurred over the course of one short week, and absent a couple of hours of worry about whether I had cancer or something, it was mostly no big deal.  I now carry a small burden – taking this pill, the first prescription that I’ve ever had to re-fill.  I’ve been relieved of a bigger burden – operating with a body that is consistently under the weather.  I wonder if I’ll even notice much of a change?  I mean, I walk through a fog these days, and I know that sleeping an average of 4 uninterrupted hours a night has a lot to do with that.  We’ll see.  I’m just glad this burden is about to be lifted.