MY STORY (Part 1) THE BEGINNING

As I approach August 20th this year, I do it with mixed emotions. August 20th is an anniversary of sorts for me. It is the day my personal hell ended and the fight of my life began. It is the day I learned what real strength was and the day I learned that you really can be at peace when faced with the possibility of death.

But it was the day after when I learned that if you want something bad enough, you have to fight for it. And sometimes you don’t always win. It was the day after when I began to lean who I really was and just how much strength I had inside.

But to get to that day 5 years ago, I must tell you a story. I tell this story in the hopes that somewhere, someone will gain strength from reading this.

We all struggle in life and each of our struggles are different. If there is one thing I have learned on this journey…it is:

Laugh!

Laugh as often as you can and as hard as you can.

Laugh at yourself, Laugh at life, Laugh through your tears.

Just Laugh

And THIS is my story.

My story begins almost a decade ago, in January 2000 while I was pregnant with my daughter. At the time I was 25, single, and five months into the pregnancy. I looked like a giant marshmallow and pretty much felt like one too.

It had not been an easy pregnancy. I had pretty much survived on Apples and Hotdogs (and I hate hotdogs, so what does that tell you?). I was one of those pregnant women who never glowed…I looked green. It was awful.

So when I started to have sharp numbing pains that ran down both my legs I just chalked it up to one more thing on the long list of hellish things that pregnancy did to me. My doctor told me that sometimes babies position themselves in such a way that it can cause sciatic nerve pains. But by month eight, my pains were so intense and the sensations so weird that my doctor was scratching his head. I did the only thing I could. I laughed it off and dealt with it. But by week 38 of my pregnancy I could barely walk without crying with every step. I couldn’t wait to get her out.

After my daughter was born the leg pains disappeared and life went on. Until one summer day in July (I think) of 2001 when I bent over to pick up my one year old daughter and experienced the sharpest pain of my life that traveled from my lower back down both legs and sent me collapsing to the ground in pain. My doctor at the time (the LAST woman doctor I will ever have) sent me in for an MRI of the L-spine, telling me that it was probably a pinched nerve. The MRI came back showing no pinched nerve and I was told that I had arthritis in my spine that may have caused the pain. I would later learn that EVERYONE has arthritis in their spine and that it really wasn’t a good diagnosis).

Life continued with no problems or issues for several years. But then in October of 2003, the rollercoaster ride took a dangerous turn that started a downward spiral that I never thought would end.

On that October evening while checking on a small garden behind our condo building, I stepped into a small sink hole and twisted my right ankle. It sounds like a small thing, and in normal peoples lives it would have been a small thing, but for me it was the one defining moment in time that marks the start of the toughest battle I have had to fight in all my life.

The instacare doctor gave me one of those air cushioned foot braces for my ankle and sent me on my way. He told me to give it a few weeks and by then it should be healed, but if it wasn’t I needed to go see my general doctor.

I’ve heard those words before “If it gets worse, or isn’t better…” I just never thought I would have to use that advise. But a few weeks later the ankle wasn’t healed and I had to go see my general practitioner, a new doctor by the name of Dr. Johnson, and a few weeks after that I twisted it again and the darn ankle just wouldn’t get better, in fact I started to notice that the toes on my right foot were also starting to tingle.

It was a weird sensation. One that closely resembles the tingling sensation you get when your foot falls asleep and you are trying to wake it up. The tingles made it difficult to walk but I just laughed it off. (Next time your leg goes to sleep, try and stand on it and walk. That is my world….weird huh?)

Then one day in about February of 2004 as I was walking up the steps to my condo my left knee gave out on me. It just gave out, no warning, no pain, no nothing. I was walking one minute and the next I was flat on my face and my daughter was freaking out. So now my right ankle was loosing strength, my right toes were tingly and my left knee had just given out on me.

I ignored the knee and tried to go on with life. However, sometime in spring of that year, maybe April the tingling in my right foot turned to numbness in my right foot and the toes on my left foot started to tingle too. It was spreading slowly up my legs and my lower back was bothering me.

I made an appointment with my doctor again who then decided to perform an MRI on my L-spine to see if there was a pinched nerve. He mentioned that I had been diagnosed with “chronic back pain” a few years ago…which floored me… since when does one episode of back pain give you a “chronic” diagnosis. I told him about the incident with lifting my daughter and the last MRI I had received. He looked it up in the system (In Utah, IHC keeps everything in a centralized system so my doc was able to see what had happened even though he wasn’t my doctor at the time….I love it ) and then sent me for the MRI.

Anyway the second MRI was done and it showed that there had been no change since the last one except for something to do with a disk. (I honestly can’t remember what it was).

That was around May or June of 2004. Up until then I was concerned, but not overly so. I didn’t know what was happening but I guess I just hoped that one day it would all go away. But that didn’t happen. What happened next scared me so bad. It was this one incident that made me realize there was something wrong with me. Something that no amount of time waiting around, was going to heal.

Part 2 Coming soon!