Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Driven? How about Desperate, Tired or Worn Out?

Oh gosh. Where do I start this morning? It is 6 AM and I am preparing to drive Patrick to Nashville for his fourth IVIG treatment.
I have neglected my blogging (the one that I have had the best intentions in the world of maintaining). I am not sure what to call it....PMS that never left all month long or this severe fatigue that has kept me grouchy and incapable of getting much done.
Not one to typically feel down and I have never thought of myself as a moody person but something has got to give here.
A group of "autism" moms in my area got together for pictures a few weeks ago and one of the mothers coordinated the photo shoot and even t-shirts where we each got to choose a word to describe our battle with autism.
I chose the word "Driven" because typically that word would describe me well in life, autism, and basically any pursuit that I chose to put my mind too. By the time the day of the shoot arrived...I felt anything but driven. Other words fluttered around my mind.....Worn Out, Tired, Fatigue, etc. You get the picture.
I am sure many of you reading this are thinking "what the heck, lady, I have felt like that for years." Which, believe me, I know we are all tired and we all have days where we want to bury our heads in the sand.
However, this is just not me. My fatigue and grouchiness are getting so severe that it is EMBARRASSING! I don't mind to snap at anyone and I don't mind to say just exactly what I am thinking....that is where it gets scary. HA. I have spent the last four years running around telling people to get healthy, work out, stay in shape and conquer life.
Now I just want to put my head in the sand, and maybe not come back out.
On the up side, I am working to find out why I feel this way and am working to get better. I am currently too tired to even do my daily workouts. I am working with my doctor to see if my hormone levels have dropped and also am wondering if it isn't a recurrence of Epstein Barr which my entire family has had at one point. Many of the chronic fatigue books I read point everything back in the direction.
We have a funny little joke in our family. Well, not really funny, and not really a joke, but I think many of you reading this will relate. My husband and parents can all tell you where they were the day Kennedy was shot, all of us probably remember what we were doing the morning of 9-11, and I can vividly remember the two weeks my husband and I laid in bed with our initial exposure to Epstein Barr. Our son Patrick was about two months old and I am also guessing this was the time he was exposed to it as well. We laid in bed all afternoon and would just stare at each other. We weren't sleepy...just couldn't get up. We had a sitter watching our one year old and our new baby, she would stay until 4 PM. I remember we would look at the clock and just dread 4 PM because we were both too chronically exhausted to get up, cook, play with the kids, etc.
I read a lot of books about how once you have that virus it stays with you forever and you keep having little occurrences of it. The more I read the more this all starts to make sense to me. My father has chronic fatigue and RA. Both most likely caused by chemical exposure some years ago. There are times that I have a fatigue flare up so bad that I wonder if I am being hit with RA and maybe I will never feel better? I panic for a few days wondering if it is all downhill from here? But then typically things ease up and I feel better. This is very descriptive of Epstein Barr.
Well....today's column has bounced around quite a bit, not sure if everyone got the gist of it that I am tired. HA. Not too tired for this lovely humour so please forgive me.
Maybe God has given me these bad days so I can learn to appreciate and cherish the good ones.

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