PD day 4

This has been a rough morning. My face hurts, my teeth hurt, my skull hurts. My fingers and toes feel numb and cold, but my torso is sweating. My right hand is tingly, and it took about 2 minutes to send a text message. I keep hitting the wrong keys when I type. I took a giant motrin, but am going to hold off on the midrin if I can. It does a stellar job knocking out the pain, but at the price of me spending the rest of the day in haze due to the mild sedative in the medication. I'm really sensitive to sedatives.

This is an average "tough" day. It's not an outright "bad" day- there's been minimal nausea and no shakes. I can't believe I told myself that this was nothing and probably normal for 15 years.

Knowing that I'm not, in fact, crazy or some sort of hypersensitive sissy has been oddly gratifying. For half my life, doctors have implied the above with impunity. Now that they can look at a single printout of an MRI, they look at me in wonder and say "how did you live with those symptoms all this time?" They're stunned I hold a full-time job. They're speechless when they find out I'm also in grad school. All I want to do is scream at them collectively "you told me I was fine! Of course I went out and got a job!"

Well, they didn't ALL tell me I was fine. When I was being tested for Narcolepsy at 19 (all came up negative, of course) the first neurologist I saw told me I probably would never live a normal life. I basically told him to go to hell. Doubtless, my life as I've lived it could never be considered normal. I like to think that I've far exceeded the expectations of normal. But I did so through intense pain and suffering that I don't like to admit to experiencing- after all, I didn't want anyone to think I was crazy, or a hypersensitive sissy.