Maybe you knew that in August I got bronchitis and had to go to the urgent care when I ruptured my eardrum and later hurt my rib from coughing. The doctor noticed how difficult it still was for me to sit with the herniated disk and showed surprise that although it's not healing completely until January, was still so painful. I told him about all the injuries I'd had since last January and he suggested I go to my regular doctor and get a bone density test seeing if I had osteoporosis. That doctor thought that was preposterous for someone as "young and healthy" as I ;P, and without doing any tests just basically overdosed me (according to the pharmacist) on Vitamin D and Calcium supplements. I asked him if there was a possibility that, like my friend (who also has stomach problems and gets easily injured from doing nothing), I had arthritis. He also said that wouldn't be the case and said just to keep doing my physical therapy and come back in three weeks to look at some x-rays they took.
I thought that was "preposterous" myself to wait three weeks, so after two of no change in pain, I went back to him, and sure enough the x-rays revealed that I have arthritis (see last post). That was comforting. I'm glad I ruptured the eardrum to be able to figure that out! (It also kept me from conveniently driving to Michigan that morning to take Preston to MBA school which would not have been good for my back!)
Now to control inflammation in my stomach and my joints, I'm also on a gluten, dairy, processed sugar, tomatoes, potatoes, pepper, eggplant, fried/processed food free diet which has been interesting; I'm getting used to it and overall it's just a tighter way of helping me to live what I already should have been with my stomach illnesses, let alone the word of wisdom. :) Its affects won't be apparent with the arthritis for several years and are more just a way of long-term living, but I think it's already helping my stomach since all of the "no-no foods" create inflammation. Anyway, it's made living a normal life (the back and ear pain still) somewhat difficult, but in September I started feeling like a normal person who just has back problems instead of an invalid. :)
The best thing all month comes in because at times when I struggled, expecting this all to be so traumatic, Cami helped me to see that if I was using the Atonement it didn't have to be that bad. All this taught me that I had indeed been slipping spiritually and that taking care of that would make all the other problems manageable. Once I did that and changed my mentality from thinking "this is hard and I need to be optimistic" to "this doesn't have to be hard if I do the right thing and rely on the Savior" I started feeling a lot more happy and a lot less depressed (which I was experiencing for a while at truly "random" times, even after I'd tried to best accept my plight). That's gone now and I'm learning all sorts of things from a book I'm reading (post coming later) about mental power that's only positive and based on personal agency/responsibility.
And thus my life moved into October...and got even more interesting....
