Fearless Friday

Two more F words. Fatigue. Falling.

I had a bad fall last Thursday. I was walking into Denny’s restaurant for our monthly MS self-help group. I always use my cane when I am outside. Somehow I stubbed my right foot and went right down on my face. A very wonderful, chivalrous, Good Samaritan gentleman came over immediately and help me get my good leg underneath me and helped me stand up. I didn’t think that I had hurt myself very badly. But I did. Another good Samaritan, a woman, came over and helped me to the bathroom as I was bleeding from both hands and my face.

Both hands had three or four places on them that were scraped and bleeding. My nose was scraped all the way down the middle, and my lip was quickly turning purple and swelling. After I cleaned up in the bathroom my angel of the day help me to our table. Then one of my fellow MS’ers went out to my car to get my first aid kit.

I asked one of the Denny’s waiters for a bag of ice. Which I received. No one at the Denny’s restaurant, however, came to ask me if I was OK. Not even the waiter who gave me the ice pack. Not sure if that is a corporate policy, but it definitely made me feel uncared for.

It’s been a week and I am healing nicely. I was going to go get a passport photo after the meeting as my passport is soon to expire. I am still waiting for my face to heal all the way so I can get that accomplished.

I have spoken about how debilitating fatigue is for me. If there is one symptom that makes all the others I have much worse, it is definitely fatigue. I have decided to go on a new medicine. This will be my fourth trial medicine. The one I had previously is called amantadine. According to the Mayo Clinic side effects include dizziness, swelling of feet, dry mouth, and purplish red net like or blotchy spots on skin called livedo reticularis. It looks like I have on leopard tights. It’s been a week and those symptoms have decreased greatly. I should see even more decrease over the next week.

So I am now taking dextroamphetamine. I started on Sunday and took the prescribed dosage of one tablet twice a day. I had a horrible time sleeping. I would close my eyes and be wide awake. I took two again on Monday and had the same reaction that night. So I’ve been only taking one tablet in the morning. I’m sleeping very well again. I may go to one and a half see how I react. I certainly find myself crashing around 4 o’clock in the afternoon.

It is such a balancing act to find the right balance of health between symptoms decreasing and side effects increasing. I am very pleased that the prior negative side effects seem to be lessening.

Our bodies are so incredibly and wonderfully made. They heal after major bone breaks, scrapes and cuts, joint replacements, muscle pulls and tears, cancer treatments and even organ replacements. There seems to be one part of our body that is not made to heal itself. And that is our nerves. There are many diseases that affect the brain and causes damage to our central nervous system. There is no cure for many of these, including MS.

I receive a daily blog posting from the Ravi Zacharias International Ministries. This morning I read this quote from C.S. Lewis. “God sometimes seems to speak to us most intimately when God catches us, as it were, off our guard. Our preparations to receive [God] sometimes have the opposite effect.”

It made me smile because multiple sclerosis has definitely caught me off guard. I am sure there are others who will read this post that can say the same thing. There are many things to catch us off guard. But if we allow ourselves to draw closer to God, he will draw closer to us. If this is what God is using in my life or your life, we can be assured that God will be with us in the middle of our storm and only together will we find victory.

And that to me is pretty awesome!

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