New Normal

 Following therapy is when I always have the most thoughts that go through my head. I guess this (therapy) all started back in December. As I was meeting with my pain doctor he suggested therapy as a way to help process and deal with life being in constant pain. With our lives being one chaotic event after another, I didn't start until May. 

I am definitely learning to process my feelings and emotions in a different way. 

I've posted a lot on Facebook about everything I've been going through as a way to try to be okay with it all myself. Honestly, it's been hard. 

I was so anxious to have my back surgery because there was a very small percent chance that a lot of my health problems would go away. Now that we are 2 weeks post-op I'm accepting the fact that this is my new normal. This is permanent. I am sad and grieving the fact that I will never have a normal body. 

The spinal cord damage has left me partially paralyzed in  my left leg, thus I have needed to use the forearm crutch to help me walk. It doesn't "act up" all the time. Just walking around the house I don't use my crutch, but there has been a few occasions that I've needed to. I've learned that it is called a paralysis attack. I've never kept track of how many I have in a day. They started several years ago. In the beginning I averaged about one a week, for a few months. Then they would stop for several months. They were becoming more often and closer together the more time went by. It wasn't until October of 2024 that they became permanent. I would say I have anywhere from 1 to 10 a day. There are time during one grocery shopping trip that they will start and stop and start again 3 or more times. I now use my forearm crutch almost 100% of the time I'm not home because I never know when a paralysis attack will hit. I've discovered that I can do short distances without an attack, like going into a gas station to get a soda, but anything more then that there is a 99% chance of it hitting me. 

I don't think I even realized how bad the paralysis was getting until after surgery. A few months before I woke up one Saturday morning and I noticed my left hand was in a weird position. My thumb and pointer fingers were curled in, leaving my other 3 fingers straight out. I went to close them to make a fist and they wouldn't move. No matter how hard I tried, they wouldn't budge. I soon realized that if I opened my hand and moved all my fingers at once, they worked just fine. Yet, if I tried to moved them down one at a time, like for counting, they would not bend. My middle finger occasionally would bend, but my ring finger and pinky would not. Obviously, I found this odd, but after 20 + years of living with both POTS and the spinal cord damage and not knowing, I was used to my body doing weird things. 

You know when someone says something and it really sticks with you and you never forget that for the rest of your life? Just before we found out about my spinal cord injury I was talking to my physical therapist. I was telling him how my left shoulder had lost it's range of motion, on my right hand my pointer and middle finger had become so weak I couldn't use them, and the 3 fingers on my left hand didn't bend properly. He looked at me and said, "You know this doesn't happen to normal people?" 

My pain doctor, upon reviewing my MRI showing the spinal cord damage, told me he suspected that the issues with my right hand (I never did tell him about the issues with my left hand) was a result of the spinal cord damage. So far, it hasn't acted up post surgery. We don't know about my left should yet because it is part healing aches and pains. Right now it does feel weaker then my right shoulder, so it just might be permanent as well.