It has been a long time since I have posted. I got caught up with the election year and I was doing a lot of posting on facebook since my last post. Facebook is nice in many ways, but it has too many ads and applications that are always bothering you to join and let your information used to spread their product among your friends. I want to try to do some serious writing in this blog in the future as long as I can, with the future being so unsure it's hard to tell where I will be in a year, five years, ten?
I was born in 1959, which makes me 53 years old, I will soon be 54 in
January. My father died of melanoma, skin cancer, when he was 53 on
November 17th 1992. I am reminded of my Dad every year when it is deer hunting season, he died right before it opened that year. Dad didn't seem very old when he died I remember thinking at the time, but now that I am his age it doesn't seem very old at all, though after living with my disease twenty years I have felt old before my time. My peers are just starting to catch up to me somewhat with limited mobility, I'm still probably closer to my friends that are ten years older than I.
Some days I wake, and I hurt so bad, and feel so sick, I wonder why I am even still alive. Today I woke up and felt relatively normal, not my normal, but regular people's normal. I don't get many days like this so it was a relief and I enjoyed it. I have had fibromyalgia since February 15th 1993, no I take that back. I had my back operation in 1993, it was a fusion of two of my vertebra, L5 and L4 I think. I had crushed my disk, it happened after throwing a bale of hay up on an already full hay wagon on my Dad's farm. In x rays I learned later that I had one vertebra that didn't have the two tabs on the sides to keep everything together, it allowed one of my vertebra to slip out of place and crush the disk. After the operation it looked like hell on the x rays, there are two steel bars with long screws that look like sheet metal screws pointed every which way. The Dr. explained that if new bone growth covered three sides of my vertebra they consider it a success and I had a big fist like blob of bone covering the whole works, so I figured I should be fine. I did know one other guy who had the operation that didn't go well, but then I had known others that were up and playing basketball after their operations. I didn't really have a whole lot of choices, it felt like there was a knife stuck in my back. It felt like hell standing, sitting, laying, laying on my side, my stomach, my back, I was lucky if I got a couple of hours sleep at a time, I was close to suicide. Then I found out that the state would pay for an operation to try to fix my back, I was still hesitant, but then I found out my wife was pregnant with our first child and I decided to have the surgery, I figured, hey I could always go the other route if the operation didn't help. My first born saved my life.
The first two months after my operation, I wasn't sure if I had made the right decision between the operation and suicide. The half of the 280 acre family farm that we had lived on sold right after my operation and my wife, her three boys, and I were forced to move in with my newly widowed Mother. I was in so much pain and bed ridden that I was no longer even capable of doing myself in. After the first month there were problems between my wife and my Mom about how the house was run and I got so tired of laying in bed and listening to it that I crawled out of bed and had everyone get in the car and we went to Cadott and rented a motel room and then moved into the low income apartments there. I hated it at the apartments, there were at least sixteen apartments in the building we lived in and at least six other smaller buildings surrounding our building. It reminded me of a bee hive, everyone seemed to know what everyone else was doing, the police were at the complex almost nightly breaking up domestic arguments, drunks, kids with drugs, theft, you name it. There was no lawn area that a person could grill or sit that wasn't in sight of everyone else. I always called it the hotel because that is what it felt like, usually the only people that lived here other than the older residents were just there for long enough to find a better place to live. Five years later I offered to help a friend clear out and get a campground running in the southern part of the state. I worked when I could, but it always made me so sore. I had some Dr.s that tried to tell me that the pain was in my head, that many places I hurt didn't have anything to do with the operation. I have to admit that at times I was wondering if I was losing my mind, it didn't make sense to me either, but I just knew how I felt.
The helping out at the campground only lasted a year, then we all moved back to Cornell, the area I was raised in and went to school. We got a nice big place, we had five boys now, that was close to school, gas stations, and down town so we wouldn't have to drive far. I was able to get a little better internet connection, it was still new to me, I would search out different pain remedies for my back and body pain. I was still bed ridden a lot with some days it being hard to get up to use the bathroom even. My marriage was going bad, there wasn't much I could do to change anything. One day I came across some information on fibromyalgia, as I read through the site I almost couldn't believe what I was reading. There on one page was a list of symptoms that matched right up with everything that was bothering me, all the strange things that didn't seem like they could ever be connected, like becoming intolerant of alcohol and becoming allergic to the sun, the pain in the spots of the body that were giving me trouble, right down the line, my problems. I printed out the articles I found along with the drugs that were listed to bring some relief to the sufferers of the disease. It took a few more weeks to convince my Dr. to give it a try he was not familiar with fibromyalgia and it wasn't a widely accepted diagnoses at the time. We had already went through the list of hard drugs and morphine, but I couldn't handle the side affects from them. One of the Dr.s that wrote one of the articles my Dr. knew and happened to work on the other side of town so he said he would confer with this Dr. and get back to me. I was contacted after that and examined again and the Dr. said that we had tried most everything else even some psychotherapy with no success so it wouldn't hurt to try. Although I still have my bad days, weeks, months, my life has been a lot more easier on me, I can get to the bathroom when I need to anyways.
Now that I have got the getting to know me part out of the way, next time I write I will get back to the main idea of this blog, trying to wake people up and get them to realize that our country has been taken over by the big corporations and corrupt politicians that are out for their own profit and not concerned for the health and well being of the people other than to make sure we are trained well enough to run their machines and to keep us divided amongst ourselves that we don't notice what they have been doing to our country.
