Saturday, July 31, 2010

Feel Like Starting Over

Last night I almost passed out. I woke up feeling very hot. I actually thought it was my apartment, but it was just me. I went to the bathroom to go pee and shortly after my face went white and my brain went foggy. Part of me almost didn't care. I thought about just letting myself pass out, but Keith was sleeping, so I decided against it in case I hit my head. I did however decide to take my blood pressure during it, since those events are more rare for me. My Blood pressure standing was 97/77 and my pulse was 134. I sat down and rechecked and it was 108/79 and my pulse of course because I sat down dropped to 88.

After that I didn't go right back to bed. So I sat online for a few hours. Eventually I went back to sleep and woke up at 9:30am shivering. I was freezing, bone cold like you get when you are out in the winter time. Keith was awake by then so I asked if he could bring me my thermometer. I checked it was only 98.1 degrees. So no fever. Eventually I warmed up and went back to bed till 130pm.

After waking up my heart was in a fast phase again. Standing it was in the 130s and so I went to the kitchen to drink V8 since high salt seems to help sometimes. I then decided I didn't care if it killed me, whatever it is that is wrong, so I went to the store, secretly hoping I would pass out in front of a bunch of people so the ambulance could just collect me and take me to a hospital. The other part of me really did not actually want that to happen. It is just sometimes I get so fed up with having 100s of symptoms, some days worse, some days better and some days like this past Fathers Day a nightmare.

Driving to the store I was playing with ideas in my head. What new primary care doctor would I get now? I wonder if a walk in clinic doctor would be my new primary care since I can't predict day to day or hour to hour how I feel? It sure would make it easier to see one regularly. I thought about my family and how they could actually just be the way they have been through all this? How will I get through all this with no support system? What if some well meaning doctor makes me worse than I am now? Then I wondered about death. Why do I always fight whatever is wrong? Maybe I should just let it kill me? Maybe by being careful I am only prolonging my own death and should just let it do what it is going to do and be done. Then I thought about how that would actually suck because being dead is the last thing I really want.

Later on I was telling Keith how sometimes I am so angry because I am tired of dealing with it, tired of writing about it, just tired. I would like nothing more than to lay on a warm beach by the ocean and feel the sun cooking me without ending up in the ER from it. How I hate my apartment because it is my jail cell. That I feel I have so much to offer other people and I have great ideas. It just feels all wasted. If I died today this really would be it. A family who never saw how cool I was, doctors who never knew how much I was suffering and a blog read by people who think I am crazy or silently suffering themselves, some I feel holding out hope that I can fix this because if I can fix it, then maybe they can too. I am the worst person in many ways to be looking up too. There are so many better people to follow, yet at the same time I understand it. I would be asking me questions too esp. if I found someone who felt just like me.

I made yet another doctors appointment with a new gastro doctor. This one hopefully is not as cold. I can deal with clinical, but not someone who is cold and won't really listen to what I am saying. I am not rigid, I am willing to listen myself, but I just can't accept what they tell me it is when I know for a fact it is not. I also really need some compassion from a doctor. This is not easy for me and sometimes I want them to just pretend they care, even a little, even if they secretly hate me.

So that appointment will be Oct 10th at 10:15am. It takes a long time to get into specialists. I tried to make an appointment with a Psych doc because I figured I am playing the game wrong. I need to convince them this is not mental. Then when a doctor stays it is mental I will have a note from a "professional" saying it is not other than a few phobias. The Psych doctor returned my call though to say they were not taking on any new people at this time, which sucks because it was so close to my house, even my sickest of sick days I could have got myself to that place. I am flirting with the idea of seeing yet another Cardio doc. Part of me wants to say "Doctor when this is all over I am going to write a book about this, do you want your chapter to be good or bad?" Can you imagine the nut job I would be labeled then haha.

Sunday, July 18, 2010

Mayo Clinic

If you follow my blog you remember on Fathers Day I went to the ER after my heart went to 155-160 beats a minute for 24 hours and was bugging out. About 36 hours after I left the ER it went back to its normal high self. Oddly, since then it has slowed down..don't get me wrong I still have hours or a day where it acts up bad..but I have been getting a lot of standing readings of 87-106 and for me that is crazy great. lol

The weird thing is since the ER my stomach is all twisted up, which I posted about in the blog before this one. Now my main complain is how sick my stomach is. Keith noticed because I stopped bitching about my heart and swapped over to my stomach and digestive tract. I don't know, I know people say 6- 18 to 6-36 months for benzo damage to heal...maybe I am going into the next phase of it and now it is upsetting my stomach..who knows. This whole experience had been odd and long, very very long.

I am in month 17 since I stopped.

OK so here is something else weird. The first 12 months off benzos I became phobic of sex. The idea made me feel queasy and almost faint like. Then like magic the idea no longer bothered me and it was just over. Also since I stopped Xanax I have not been my normal creative self..at least to the level I once was. I just sat online and read books. About a week ago I woke up and felt like that was back.

It was like someone turned a light switch on and all my creative ideas flowed back. I made a few web sites and started coming up with money making ideas, which is completely the old me..so my point is maybe I am still healing up.

I can honestly say my mind seems to be 99% back to what it was since the drug, now my body really needs to catch up because that is only about 50% back to my normal.

I am convinced that benzo withdrawal can trigger POTS (postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome). Speaking of which I got an email yesterday from the Mayo Clinic (I had sent a video about my heart rate and showed how it behaves). They said they passed it along to a doctor there for consideration. The only good news that I hold onto about POTS is that if the med. did trigger that in me 80% of people get well from it within 5 years. So, I figure by 2014 I should be good to go lol.

Saturday, July 17, 2010

My Belly Stirs

My body seems to have adapted to the summer heat, as long as it is 90 or below anyway. I still have my a/c units running, but being on the 2nd floor it doesn't really keep up. My electric bill was $197 this month, which is crazy it is usually $70.

My stomach has been causing me all sorts of drama since I went to the ER on Father's Day. I mean it always causes drama, but this is just more dramatic. I keep bloating and have this sick feeling most of the time 3 inches above the belly button. I took some ginger tonight and it helped some. I drank it down with some hot tap water, which is not good, but I have no coffee mug and will have to get one. I think I am going to look into getting some ginger pills and see if that helps. I took Prevacid, Zantac and Pepcid in the past and they all have caused me bad colon cramps, so that is not cool.

Besides that I have been distracting myself, esp. since I have not been sleeping well at all. I keep getting 5 to 6 hours of sleep and I am one of those people who don't do well unless they get 8 or 9. Anyway so I was feeling the need to start making web pages again. This is the first time since Xanax withdrawal that I felt like it. I ended up making three automatic blogs, which is actually cool because I don't have to do anything. They just update themselves by pulling videos on certain topics from other video sites and auto embedding the code.

An online friend of mine who has her own health issues going on right now mailed me a book called. The Journey: A Practical Guide to Healing Your Life and Setting Yourself Free by Brandon Bays . It is a New Age type of book. However it is still an interesting concept.

I was looking forward to doing that detox till my body got all funky on me, but it is still on my to do list. I called around to a few companies and looked at their websites to see if there was any microwave food products that were gluten free. I now have several lined up so when I do cut gluten completely out of my diet I will have a strong backup plan in case I don't feel like making food. Like (and this is not good for you) Frito's corn chips are gluten free. Which you would assume anyway since it is made with corn, but there are so many ingredients thrown in the mix often times you have to check to be sure.

Thankfully Uncle Ben's Microwave White Rice is also gluten free. They didn't list their microwave long grain brown rice as being gluten free though.

Anyway so that is what I have been up to.