Big Damn Heroes

Well, I’m a few months into my diagnosis, and very little has changed. Nothing better, nothing worse.

The first med I was given was called primidone, and it might have stilled the tremors. I say might because I wouldn’t know… the damn pill knocked me out like a light. I was basically sleeping 12-16 hours a day on it. No sale.

So they switched me to Toprol, which my wife takes for high blood pressure. At the lowest possible dose, I felt no effect. When that dose was doubled (at doc’s recommendation), my blood pressure plummeted. At that point, I was shaking so badly that I couldn’t even bring a fork to my mouth. Next.

Now I’m on something called Klonopin (clonazepam). I’m not seeing any impact at all yet, but the doc is ramping me up slowly.

She also referred me to a motor-disorder specialist, and I went to see him on Monday. He put me through a more extensive battery of tests, and noted that, in addition to my hands, I’ve got a slight head tremor and a pretty good-sized tremor in my legs when standing. I honestly hadn’t noticed, but I’ve been living with it since I was a kid… we learn to ignore the things we endure.

So the new doc has decided to add Topamax (topiramate) to the drug cocktail. Again, this is a ramp-up scenario… low dosage for a few days, then higher, then higher. I’ll probably know in two weeks how it’ll work out.

I’ve been at least partially blind my entire life, but because I can read, watch TV, and move around safely, I don’t think about it much. It’s one of those “never known life any other way” things.

But every now and then, it causes me to embarrass myself, and I feel like a complete fucking idiot. For example, take my tendency to slam my head into those low-hanging produce scales in grocery stores… I usually watch the ground when I walk, and thus don’t see stuff at eye level.

Or today, when I was trying to help someone on a technical mailing list. The words “alternate” and “related” were there in plain sight… I read them over and again. But somehow, I merged them into a single word, and came to a completely incorrect conclusion. Looked like a fool.

Then there’s the granddaddy of my mishaps. It happened when I was eighteen, and almost killed me.

I was working for my dad, framing houses. (Or in my case, carrying lumber.) The crew was decking the roof, and I was playing fetch with nails and lugging around plywood. Dad was on the roof, and shouted down for me to run out front to get a box of clips.

Now, Dad was constantly yelling at me for not working hard enough. I hated being there, and was forced into it anyway. Plus, Dad just liked yelling at me. So I hurried out front, grabbed the box, and started making my way back through the maze of unfinished walls and braces.

As I stepped out on to the back porch, I began to turn and hold the box up so someone could grab it. Unfortunately, I failed to notice that Stan (one of my dad’s guys) was pulling up a sheet of plywood at that moment.

(Typically, when you’re decking a roof, you set up a pair of sawhorses next to the house. Then you use them to stack 4′x8′ sheets of plywood on edge, leaning against the roof. To get them the rest of the way up, the guy up in the rafters grabs one end of a sheet, swings it back and forth, and builds up enough momentum to carry it on to the roof.)

Stan’s sheet of plywood was traveling pretty fast at that moment, which probably contributed to my not seeing anything. Whatever the case, he brought the edge of it right into my face.

As I recall, my first thought was that I hadn’t brought the clips fast enough, and Dad had reached down from the roof and hit me in the head with a 2×4.

My second thought was lost to posterity, because I passed out.

I came to a bit later (somewhere between a few seconds and a minute), and discovered that I was face down on the porch. This seemed odd to me, since I had no memory of trying to take a mid-day nap. I briefly considered getting up before Dad started yelling again, but my body didn’t seem to be willing to play along.

“Oh yeah, someone hit me,” I thought. Since standing didn’t seem to be an option, and I couldn’t see anything for some reason, I opted to moan a bit and find out if anyone was paying attention.

They apparently were. By my dad’s account, he looked over and saw Stan staring at the ground, holding a sheet of plywood. He wasn’t moving, or doing much of anything else. Then he turned his head and said, matter-of-factly, “I killed Roger.” Dad kind of blinked and replied, “What?”

“I killed Roger.” He returned to staring at the ground, frozen in place.

My next memory is of my dad grabbing me, turning me over, and saying something to the effect of “Holy fucking shit.” There was a growing circle of blood around my head, which explained why I couldn’t see out of my right eye. Too much blood everywhere.

Dad and a guy named Billy grabbed me and carried me out to the front of the house, setting me down on a stack of lumber. I began to note a growing headache, and a burning sensation on my face. I mentioned this as Dad used water from the lunch cooler to clean my face.

He informed me that this was probably due to the fact that my eyelid was detached and hanging by a piece of skin. (That explained the left eye.) Billy held my eyelid in place as Dad drove us to the nearby emergency clinic. The burning was getting worse, and the headache was working its way closer to “overwhelming”.

I don’t remember getting out of the truck. I remember hearing a nurse/receptionist shout “Oh god!” when we stumbled in, though. And then I was on my back, bright lights were shining on me, and there were people all around. I wasn’t even gonna try to open my eyes, but I could sense ‘em.

The doc immediately shot me up with painkillers, which ended the burning and the pounding. Then he cleaned out the wound and started stitching. As he worked, he encouraged me to talk. So I did.

“Dad?”

“Yeah?”

“Will you go buy me a copy of Soldier of Fortune magazine?”

“Why?”

“‘Cause I’m gonna hire a hitman to shoot Stanley.”

My mom came to pick me up, and freaked out. I had a cracked skull, a reattached eyelid, and a big, deep wound in my cheek. (Another half an inch higher, and I would have lost the eye. A bit more force and my skull would have opened up.) As we stopped to pick up some meds on the way home, I sat in the car and looked in a mirror. I was vaguely, weirdly impressed to note that I looked like Sylvester Stallone at the end of any random Rocky movie.

As time passed, my left eyebrow hair fell out, leaving me looking rather odd. Took weeks for it to grow back. And the left side of my face and scalp was completely numb for months… I guess some major nerves were cut. Oddly enough, when the nerves healed, they were in overdrive. The left side of my scalp tingled for at least a couple years, and was hyper-sensitive to stuff like rough hair brushing. Even now, eighteen years later, I can still feel a difference between the left and right sides of my head.

So like I was saying… not being able to see properly kinda sucks.

After limping around for five or six days, the wife finally convinced me to go to the doctor. Turns out I have a small break in my ankle, related to a bout of stupidity I endured last week.

It also seems I have a heel spur. This means than Janet and I are on track to contract every disease, disability, and detriment in existence before the year is out. Go team!

Well, I’m back from the neurologist, and what fun! It appears I have a new diagnosis (and another on the way) to add to my collection.

First, I was born with cataracts.

Then they figured out I was color-blind.

Then the cataract surgery (circa 1975) left scar tissue that had to be corrected with subsequent surgeries.

Then, around eleven, I became intensely withdrawn and moderately paranoid. It went unaddressed until twenty years later, when it was diagnosed as social anxiety disorder.

When I was in third grade, I noticed that my hands would shake whenever I held a pencil. Over the last few years, it grew progressively worse… gripping a glass of milk would cause my hands to shake pretty strongly, and intense emotional situations would result in wild, uncontrollable spasms. The wife says the tremors happen even when I’m not aware of it… I tend to make dining tables in restaurants vibrate when I place my hands on them. Most of the time, reaching for a receipt from a cashier is an adventure in embarrassment, and god help anyone who has to shake hands with me if I’m at all nervous.

(Which, thanks to the social anxiety, is pretty much all the time.)

So the doctor tested me, and concluded: essential tremor. She prescribed something called “Propranolol”“Primodone”, which a little online research says helps 60% of people like me. Time will tell on that front.

And to cap it off, I’m going back for lab work next week. Since I was five or so, my fingertips have been overwhelmingly sensitive… having anything touch them would send chills down my spine, and in extreme cases, cause pain. The result is that I hated cutting my fingernails, which led my father to charmingly conclude that I was a pre-school homosexual. He basically mocked and harassed me about it for the next fifteen years, again making the ol’ social anxiety dig in that much deeper.

The doctor seems to think she knows what it is, but isn’t making an actual diagnosis until she gets the blood work back. There’s apparently a treatment for it, whatever it is.

Again, time will tell.

I went in for a mole-patrol last Monday, and while the dermatologist was busy torturing me by snipping off the skin tags around my shoulders with a pair of scissors and wholly inadequate amounts of Lidocaine, he spotted a mole he didn’t like. So out came the razor blade, and he sent off a chunk of it for a biopsy.

Then this morning I get a call, telling me that the mole is, well, some long-ass series of words that I couldn’t hope to reproduce here with any degree of accuracy. “Something that could become something” seemed to be the gist. And they want to cut out the rest of it before that happens.

So I’m off to the doc tomorrow morning for forty-five minutes of sheer, unadulterated fun with a scapel. Yay me!

My better half woke up in considerable distress around 2am Sunday. She proceeded to barf pretty much once an hour for the next ten hours, and couldn’t keep down so much as a sip of water… at which point we made a run to the E.R.

They ended up pumping two drip bags into her to restore some semblance of hydration. The doctor was noncommittal as to the cause, telling us that he’d seen a half-dozen people with the same symptoms over the preceding few hours… although the patient herself is still convinced that it was the pork tenderloin she cooked the night before.

All together, we were stuck at the hospital for six hours, which was made even less fun by the fact that I was operating on two hours of sleep. But we’re home now, she’s snoozing with the dogs, and hopefully all will be well in a few days.

Well… that’s unsettling.

Someone was asking for remedies on another blog, and after I anwered him directly, I figured I’d go ahead and post the same thing here. Ya never know, someone might get some use out of it.

I swear this has worked for me 100% of the time, and I’ve managed to teach the technique to my wife. She hasn’t perfected it yet, but if I walk her though it, it works.

Sit or recline somewhere comfortable and preferably quiet. Breathe in a steady, normal fashion.

Then begin to concentrate on your abdominal muscles, with the objective being to relax them as much as possible. Focus on any muscular tension you can detect and try to dissipate it. You may find it helpful to have someone else place a hand on your stomach to give you a clearer focal point.

That’s it… never fails.

An awful case of sinusitis has been kicking my ass for days. Constant between-the-eyes headaches slowly escalated to swelling at the base of my gums. Then the swelling spread until one side of my face was puffed up like a beachball. (Still is, as of this edit.)

I finally gave in and headed to the ER on Sunday afternoon. They gave me a shot and some Vicodin, the latter keeping the pain just barely manageable for a few hours at a time.

On the positive side, my vitals once again looked pretty average. No mean feat for someone who weighs as much I do… all things considered, I seem to stumble backwards into health.

They want me to do follow-up if things haven’t cleared up by Thursday… man, I don’t think I could handle this much constant pain for four more days. Call me a wuss, but having my nose, teeth, and palate throb in time with my pulse is just not my thing.

(On a side note, blogging from my cellphone while sitting on a hospital bed is kinda cool.)