- The three years following my Dad's death, I worked 50 hours a week, communicated with clients and trained fellow employees, took care of my Mom as much as I could, and just barely survived.
- July 2005: My Mom had an ischemic stroke, spent three months in three horrible nursing homes punctuated by hospital stays. In November, my Mom died. And I was alone.
- 2006 was swamped with work and cleaning out my parents' home, selling it, and paying off their mortgage. And I was always on the roller coaster of "today I am functional and the next few weeks barely." But I worked and maintained my professional reputation. Unfortunately, by the time my doctor discovered the mycoplasma, it had become systemic—yes, that means you are stuck with it. It flourishes in bile ducts and often enjoys chewing up your joints. By the autumn of 2006, the joints in my hands were going downhill rapidly. Other doctors who saw my hands thought that I had rheumatoid arthritis. No. Been tested a million times. It's the mycoplasma. Too bad they did not catch it at the famous medical institution when it could have been successfully treated.
- It was almost winter. One evening, the ring finger of my right hand just snapped totally backward. I wasn't doing anything. It just happened. The pain was… And cortisone shots didn't help either.
- February 2007: Hand surgery. Had a cast on for several weeks. When it came off, the results were disappointing. Too much damage had been done by the mycoplasma. My hands were permanently disfigured and I had to learn to work in strange ways. As a writer, learning to type totally differently and quickly (I had always been very fast) was challenging. But I managed.
- However, the big thing was increasing, screaming pain in my joints. I was finally sent to a rheumatologist who kept me on a high dosage of Vicodin for most of the year.
- By late autumn 2007, the joints in my hands had fused and the pain finally subsided. Unfortunately, the rheumatologist had no idea how to get me off the Vicodin except by "tapering down." This does not work well for some people. For six weeks, I shook, sweated, vomited, seized, and every other damned thing. Sorry, I had to say "damned" here. I also lost most of my vision. After screaming at him—and I never raise my voice—he ran around the hospital and found someone who told him to put me on this other drug, an opiate-blocking drug. Two weeks later, I was alive and functioning. How did I manage to work throughout all this? I don’t know. I did not have anyone to help me.
2008
You already heard what the first few weeks were like—getting off the Vicodin. Horrible drug. In the middle of all that, my ophthalmologist found something really wrong in my right eye and sent me to the chief in charge of corneas. Emergency, outpatient surgery ensued…and they could never figure out the composition of the "white substance" that they removed from my eye.
By the third week of March, I had been experiencing weeks of gut problems. No longer able to blame the Vicodin withdrawal, I went to see my gynecologist after some spotting. He sent me for tests and the results required a "D & C," as they call it in the trade. Ten days after this procedure, I still was very ill, unable to eat. On a Thursday evening in early April, I called the ambulance.
It was good that I did so, as my appendix was about to burst. My general surgeon, a good friend of my personal physician, was at my side rapidly. Very good guy. Unfortunately, he was not in charge of hospital operations. After a successful surgery, I was left for 15 hours to thrash in my bed, my chest and my head exploding, refused any of my regular medications.
Saturday morning, less than a day after the surgery, I was discharged, tossed into a taxi, and sent home with what was later diagnosed as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). The crazy, 30-second flashbacks in my vision for ten days were beyond scary.