And my day begins …..
I rarely post personal posts, it’s always about the art for me, but in the spirit of ‘social’ media, I thought I might share my last 6 months or so – and I warn you now, it’s a little long. October of last year I contracted Covid, it wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t pleasant and I seemed to recover fairly well. About a month later, I noticed I was still tired and still getting some muscle pain, stiffness and headaches but didn’t think anything too serious, just getting over Covid, everyone had different reactions. I did have two vaccinations with not great reactions, but hey when you’re a little older you do what you need to do. But things didn’t get better they got progressively worse. Time to see the doctor, so I had tests and saw three different gp’s, all good but needed a specialist to diagnose what was actually going on. Problem was I couldn’t get in for 6 months. Natural remedies for the time being seemed to be the answer – but the symptoms were still getting worse – the muscle stiffness was getting to the point that it took 10 minutes to get out of bed, getting dressed was difficult, stairs presented another problem and just getting off the loo presented a whole series of problems – over time and I was losing muscle strength, I couldn’t lift the larger canvasses, actually I had trouble lifting anything even a plate from a table. My husband has health issues and not that he needs a carer as yet, he can’t help around the house at all and I run the house from shopping to paying the bills, I also work 7 days a week at tutoring and producing art and as the sole bread winner – things were getting serious. I visited a great acupuncturist who has helped me incredibly but the issues couldn’t be addressed on a permanent basis. In all honestly, some days, I was at the point of simply not wanting to go on, I mean 6 months ago I was a vibrant, active reasonably healthy woman in admittedly her sixties slowing down a little, but busy, busy, busy and mentally on top of things – now I couldn’t even think what to put on a grocery list and I was moving around like a woman in her 90’s ! Now I know that there are people out there worse off than I’ve been, but it’s still hard no matter what your circumstances.
Well the good news is that I have just seen my specialist – a rheumatologist and after many many tests, he has diagnosed me with polymyalgia rheumatica and osteoporosis, that last last one came out of the blue! I need to take some medications that I’m not happy about taking, they have some unpleasant side effects some will happen and some may happen, but with any luck and augmenting with natural supplements and exercise, I might just circumvent the nasty side and come out on top of this. The two most interesting things I’ve found, is that as soon as I started taking the first medication I felt relief within 4 hours and the second is that the Doctor has confirmed that Covid triggered these underlying conditions of auto immune and inflammatory responses in my body.
I wanted to share this with others, in case you have a similar story and my story might resonate with you and give you a little consolation in that you are not alone. I will have to deal with this for the rest of my life but I CAN deal with it now, it shall have a continuing impact but at the moment I feel like a little miracle has touched my life and I can walk up those rotten stairs at home at a fast pace!
