An Interesting Week

This week began with two brain MRIs and me subsequently learning I have an abnormality in my brain (most people who know me would be like, well duh!). And it ended with a three-day admission in the hospital. I guess you could call it an eventful week.

After many weeks of not feeling well at all (and seriously neglecting the blog because of so little energy for it), everything came to a head when my BP and pulse became so unstable that my heart doctor basically took one look at me and then sent me straight from her office to a hospital admission. I should have been more on top of my fluids. I should be more on top of a lot of things. Oops, my bad.

Something I have noticed about myself lately is that I do not always fight for my health as hard as I should. As someone who has prided herself on her determination in athletics and academics and generally in life, and who has pushed herself relentlessly to the limit, I seem to have adopted a less than stellar attitude toward this. I guess a part of me doubts that my health is really as bad as it is. Or that I do not want to admit things are as bad as they are. The old “all-or-nothing” thinking that if I’m not the worst case of fill-in-the-blank, then it’s really not bad at all. Yeah. Not my most brilliant of moments, folks.

So, this week I have learned a hard lesson, which is that I need to take much better care of this fragile body I own. Even if it seems like day after day of getting nowhere, I still need to try. If I don’t, it seems like things can go downhill pretty fast.

So, to recap this week’s events:

Brain MRI – being hurtled head-first into a long, noisy tube while simultaneously getting contrast injected into your vein. They also put this hannibal-type cage over your face and it has a mirror, which is cool, I guess. The end product of all this being that they saw I have an abnormal growth on my pituitary. And now I need to see an endocrinologist – but hopefully will not have to have brain surgery.

The Great Dehydration Scandal of 2016 – Well, I thought I was lucky having not been in the hospital in 2016 yet, but that winning-streak came to a screeching halt this past Monday. I was lucky to have a team of compassionate and informed professionals who all treated me with respect and who viewed my autonomic dysfunction as something serious and life-altering. Highlights include copious amounts of IV saline, an adverse reaction to compazine that literally had me panicking, joking around with my GI doctor and calling his cell-phone for him when he lost it somewhere on the unit, and seriously the best damn omelette I’ve eaten in a while.

So anyhow, now that I am on the road to feeling better and treating myself more wisely, I hope to be back to blogging a bit more soon! Thanks for sticking by me.