I never mentioned any of my ailments yet.  Today is the day, because my back is killing me.  Everyone get ready to take out your teeny, tiny violins to play for me.

Last year about this time I started getting really severe back pain.  I ignored it for a long time, because that’s what I do.  I thought it would pass, because I have never had back problems in my entire life.  And honestly I have done some seriously hard manual labor in my day.  Truly.  Anyhow, I had been doing some back breaking stuff all summer, but I always wear a back brace, and although I had been sore many a day, it had always recovered well.  This was completely different.  For one, it started about a month after I stopped doing manual labor in the yard.  It was really low, like possibly my pelvis bones but in the back, and deep in the tissue.  It was not in the spine, and it wasn’t in any muscles that could be massaged.  I tried to come up with causes like wearing heels to work, or standing too much, being vegan and having a vitamin deficiency, a kidney infection… anything.  At some point I realized that I couldn’t stand upright in one place for more than a couple of minutes without debilitating pain and difficulty walking and figured it might be time to get it checked.  

I went to my OB/GYN to be checked for a kidney infection.  TMI, but I have been prone to bladder and probably kidney infections for my entire life, so that idea wasn’t out of the question.  Besides that, I didn’t have a regular doctor that I liked or trusted as much as my OB/GYN.  So I got checked out for that, and it was reading no problems.  My OB Dr. thought it was probably just muscle spasms from overworking in the summer and it would pass.  I felt a little better.  I waited, and then one day on the way to work I realized that one of my fingers was numb.  It’s difficult to describe, but it wasn’t the typical pins and needles when your hand falls asleep or something.  The thing is that spots on my fingers had been going numb for a few weeks, and I thought it was just due to the cold.  It happened in the mornings on my way to work when my car was cold; I don’t park in the garage and I don’t really warm the car up much.  I also wasn’t wearing gloves, so it was easy to brush off the numbness with the fact that my hands were really, really cold.  It was happening pretty often.  One morning they had spots of cold numbness on the side of a finger and then on another, but when I got to work and went inside, all three fingers from middle to pinkie on each hand went completely numb and I couldn’t feel them at all.  They were completely white as if I was dead, and my middle fingertips were blue.  A coworker saw me freaking out shaking my hands and looked and said “that happened to me right before I had my heart attack, you better get that checked out.”  Uh, you think?  When my fingers would “come back” it was extremely painful, by the way, and my fingers would turn bright red.  I couldn’t touch anything for a long time.  I couldn’t work because I couldn’t type.  I called my old internist whom I didn’t particularly care for, but would have to do in a pinch.  After hearing my symptoms, seeing my hands, white spots and all, poking and prodding me and testing my blood and checking the urine test results from the OB/GYN he told me I likely had Lupus or Rheumatoid Arthritis and I needed to see a Auto-Immune Specialist (Rheumatologist).  Fucker.  Seriously, nothing like scaring the shit out of someone.  For the record, I know someone who died from complications related to Lupus, and I worked with someone who had Rheumatoid Arthritis (which was really bad) and both were scary propositions for me.  Of course the specialist couldn’t get me in immediately, so I got to sit on the idea for a while.  That’s always fun, isn’t it?   

I just realized how very long this post is going to be.  There is very little way of shortening it up aside from the dreaded “To be continued…” and you should know how I feel about that.  I apologize.

When I finally got in to see the Rheumatologist, she ran lots more blood work and said that I had deficiencies in both D and B12 which were missed by the regular physician when he read my initial blood results.  Fucker.  Remember I said I didn’t like him?  So she gave me 4 prescription D vitamin pills and told me to buy B12 at the store and be gone.  There were no markers for any specific Auto-Immune disorder in my blood.  I would later find out that there were never any markers for ANY auto-immune disorder that would indicate that there was any possibility of my having Lupus or Rheumatoid Arthritis when my physician gave me that possible diagnosis.  She said that I likely had Raynaud’s Phenomenon which consists pretty much of exactly the symptoms I had been having in my hands, although there was no test to show it in my blood.  The good news is that since I haven’t had these symptoms since my 20s the Raynaud’s is probably a “precondition” to the future onset of a yet unknown auto-immune disorder.  She did mention the wretched L word again, but I choose not to accept that.  Oh wait, that’s not good news.  So this is all shitty and bad, but it doesn’t account for my back pain.  Which is not being addressed, or even considered.  She gave me a prescription for a muscle relaxer so that I can give them a try for the back, along with a little more waiting to see if it would repair itself.

Between visits, and I’ve had a few, I started to have additional symptoms.  Extreme sensitivity in my spine in my neck, joint pain, muscle pain, headaches, and finally a vibration in my brain.  I went back to the Rheumatologist and asked for an MRI for my back and she ordered a CT for my brain to rule out any tumors or stroke (sorry mom, you probably don’t want to go through this all again in greater detail).  I was also tested for many other things, including thyroid, liver, clotting disorders and a host of other stuff.  Again, all tests came back clean as a whistle.  Apparently I am as healthy as can possibly be, aside from the back pain, the vibrating brain, the blue fingers, an inability to sleep, joint pain, muscle pain, and crankiness related to all of the above.

My good friend Leanne suggested that a lot of my symptoms fall under the category of Microwave Illness when you do a little googling research.  She’s good at that.  At this point I’d try anything, so after reading up on it a bit, I moved the cordless phone out of my bedroom and have stopped using the cordless phones at home and cell phones unless talking on a corded headset (thus the iphone).  I got some crap for even considering this as an option, and some insensitive family and friends even laughed at me.  I guess you need to walk a mile in my shoes before you understand the helplessness that comes when you have no diagnosis and a host of symptoms and doctors give you THE LOOK.  You know the one:  head cocked slightly to the side with a gaze that just seethes with “you have got to be making this shit up.”  At this point I also took a Dr. hiatus because they’ve done enough to me, taken enough of me and looked at all of me enough.  ENOUGH.  They can’t find anything, the Rheumatologist essentially dismissed me, and I’m tired.  Plus, I was feeling somewhat normal at the time, and had accumulated a stack of medical bills I needed to pay off.

And now again with the back pain.