I am now fifty years old. My mom was a nurse, and as far back as High School, I remember her telling me I was going to have intestinal problems due to nerves, and stress. My dad and I didn’t get along, and argued frequently, and the boy I was in love with had a habit of not showing up when he was supposed to, and I didn’t like school. Yes, my intestines were gearing up. It has always been common place for me to feel as if my “stomach” hurt, but in reality, it has always been my intestines. Something I, of course, never wanted to deal with. My mom wanted me to go for a colonoscopy when I was in my late teens, early twenties, but that wasn’t going to happen, and didn’t. Instead, I let all the emotional baggage I was carrying, eat away at my insides, and just learned to live with it. “It” became the norm.
When I was twenty six, I was awakened from a sound sleep by what can only be explained as a knife darting in and out of my eyeball. The pain was intense. I had no idea what was happening to me. I screamed for my mother, who ran down two sets of steps, and told her what was happening. She drove me to the emergency room, and they said my shutter in my eye wasn’t opening and closing the way it should, it was staying open, causing the pain. They gave me drops to dilate my eye and stop the pain, and told me to get to an eye doctor the next day. This I did, but unfortunately, our family eye doctor was very old, and gave me drops that started to cause cataracts, so we switched to a younger doctor. This time, it was a neurologist. He could find nothing wrong. Then, she took me to a hospital, and four doctors examined me and said I had Epstein’s Bar Virus Syndrome, and rheumatoid arthritis, and I would be blind and crippled by the time I was 28. My mom looked at me, told me to get dressed, and she started searching for another doctor. She kept asking the doctors she worked with that she could take me to, and finally, we ended up right across the street from the hospital she worked in.
This doctor was a retina specialist and put me on cortisone, which I had never heard of, and on a high dose, my eye was okay, but I still had to take drops, causing my eyesight to be blurred, which presented a problem at work, since I sorted mail all day. I did my best for a while, but every time the dosage got down to ten milligrams, my eye would flare up again. One day, I heard someone at the post office I had worked at for five years, ask who the “new girl” was. The cortisone had caused my face to blow up, and people didn’t recognize me. I went to my retina specialist, and asked if there was anything else he could do. He said he could give me a shot of cortisone directly into my eye, but the pain was intense. I said, “Go for it.” He did, and he was right! The pain was overwhelming, and subsided some, but hurt through the whole day. However, it cured the problem, and I was able to get on with my life.
I eventually got married and had three kids. I adored being a mother and having the kids I always wanted. Life revolved around them and the house, and the errands, and all the usual things moms go through with three young children. When they were five, eight, and ten, I went to a Christmas party down the street.
I was sitting on a white couch, watching others dance, a technique I never acquired, and all of a sudden, I felt as if the rear of my pants was wet. I got scared, and got up to go the bathroom. Thankfully, I had on black pants. There was a line at the door, and I had to wait awhile until i could have the room all to myself. I pulled down my pants, and blood gushed everywhere. All over the floor, the toilet, even the side of the tub. I had no idea what was going on. Or where the blood was coming from. But I knew there were people waiting to get in! It took me a few minutes to clean up, and then I had to wait until one of the teens drove me to a parking lot up further from their house, to get my car. I sat on my coat. I got home, paid the babysitter, and used my own bathroom, and the same experience repeated itself.
The next day, I got in to see my Doctor, and she immediately wanted me to see a specialist and called and made the appointment for me right away.
