The last migraine peaked almost 10 days ago, but my eyes still don’t feel right and the space cadets feeling is still there. Still tired and achy too, wonder if something else is going on, like an arthritis flare up.
Today I admitted to myself that I am unemployable. This has probably been true for several years, but I refused to see what employers were seeing quite clearly. People with chronic degenerative diseases are not a good bet, even if they only seek part time work. I applied for disability.
I got into my scooter and went to the Reuss Federal Building. I detached my canvas bag from the scooter arm to pass through the xray. The security guards asked me to go around the walk-through detector (suppose all that metal might have permanently warped it) and hand screened me. One of the guards escorted me to the elevator and instructed me to get off on the second floor for Social Security. I went in, took a number and waited to talk to a clerk, then filled in a form while waiting to meet an interviewer. It hit me why I had been avoiding this.
Interviewer: Do you use that scooter to get around.
Me: Yes, I tried to use a walker but it makes my shoulders hurt. Don’t have a lot of upper body strength.
Yeah, right.
When I took medical leave from my full time job, I slept for about two weeks, then started working out in the pool in the Joint Efforts class at the YMCA two mornings a week. To get to the pool through the shower room, the walker worked a lot better than the scooter. I used it to get to the bus stop (about 500 steps). The first weeks, I would fall asleep in the bus on the way home, eat a light meal, then sleep for the remainder of the afternoon. After a couple months my endurance got better and I was able to move parts of my body that had been too stiff or painful to use for ages. I could turn my head to look over my shoulder, something I hadn’t been able to do since the days before the Y2K bug, before the first major setback. Backing up in the scooter became less exciting.
I was losing weight, but not strength. I attributed that to detoxification from the time I spent in an office environment, was eliminating water instead of getting bloated.
There was a lot of positive feedback for using the walker. Even if it hurt my hands and arms and I had to stop often and sit on it to rest, people like to see you standing upright. After I decided to leave the full time job for a part time job with health insurance, I added swim lessons to the workout.
Things went well for a while, then as I was finishing training the full time staff person who was to take my place, I fell ill and was unable to work out, mainly because of problems breathing. I was just getting back into working out in the pool again in the summer of 2003 when I noticed that my left shoulder was sore. It got progressively worse and by November it was extremely painful and I had lost a lot of range of motion. It was bad, made it difficult to do things like eat, bathe, dress, and get in and out of bed. Typing at a computer keyboard became like torture. There is a name for this – frozen shoulder.
I saw my doctor in December then started physical therapy. After two weeks the pain was still acute and it hadn’t loosened up when I caught some kind of virus. I had a flu shot that fall, but one of the strains was not included. A friend who visited me just before Christmas fell quite ill, and I had been using public transportation to go to the hospital, so hard to tell where I caught it. I gave up and just crashed out. This year, it started to loosen up, so I can now touch the top of my head again.
I still have pain but have started using the walker or a cane occasionally. I am afraid it might come back if I am not extremely careful. I did some research on the internet and found such things are more common in people with metabolic disorders, in particular diabetes. It is part of the heartbreak of mito, which is a metabolism disorder. Lots of things can go wrong. When you start to get on top of one problem, something else seems to crop up.
So, how was I to express all that in a simple questionnaire?
