Hi guys! I know I haven’t been posting much lately. I’ve been having a hard time balancing the kids, the house, working, illnesses, pets, life in general. The past couple of years have been super rough but I’ve been trying to do whatever I can to keep up with things.
Feeding Birds at The Blue Zoo – Spokane, WA
I’m finally back home after being out of town for 9 days. I’m trying to get back into habits of doing things on my blog, Facebook, and Instagram. I’ve managed Facebook and Instagram a bit lately, but I’ve been a bit behind here. I spent today working on getting the SSL fixed for the blog, so that the error that the connection isn’t secure isn’t there and potentially worrying anyone.
Anyway, despite behind the scenes stuff here’s a bit of an update on how we’re all doing. :3
One of our cats is apparently a lot older than we thought, she’s closer to about 17 years old now and has health issues that go along with it. She has the beginnings of kidney disease and hyperthyroid. So we’ve been doing a lot of appointments, and trying to get her to gain weight again and stay as healthy as we can keep her.
The rest of the cats have been find enough. Shadow had a fever of unknown origin last summer that took over a week of multiple visits, tests, and lots of money to figure out what might be bothering him before getting the Fever of Unknown Origin diagnosis.
We all caught COVID in January, and it hit me so hard. I felt like I didn’t fully recover but kept trying to hold on to homeschooling Risi and keeping up with work and everything else I needed to do. I thought it was just the stress, my blood pressure needed medication, my cholesterol was starting to get high instead of just ‘slightly high’, and I figured changing my diet and taking meds for those two issues would fix things. It didn’t, and my doctor was confused on why things weren’t changing and I was just getting worse. I choked on food, choked on water, couldn’t walk across the room without my heart hurting. I was dizzy, confusing words when I talked and typing was frustrating since I couldn’t focus well enough to get my thoughts through all that clearly without a lot of edits. Things that would have taken me 10-15 minutes before, were taking me 25-30 since I needed to put in so much extra effort to make sure I was actually typing real words and things that made sense.
It turned out that what was really wrong and had been causing me so many problems for awhile now is that I was severely anemic, to the point that if I was just the slightest bit more so I would have needed a blood transfusion ASAP. On top of that, my B12 levels were so low that my entire body was suffering hardcore. I found this out right before my birthday back in March, so we’ve been spending a lot of time at the doctors office since then. Lots of blood tests, shots, appointments checking on symptom progress, and my doctor has even been consulting with a hematologist for it all.
So many of the symptoms that I just figured were from my fibromyalgia and stress getting to me ended up being mostly from my B12 levels being severely deficient. So we did the usual 5 weeks of 1000mg B12 injections, wait 3 weeks, and test my blood levels again. Despite having been given 5000mg of B12, my numbers didn’t go up even by 100. Which wasn’t expected in the slightest. Instead of doing the once monthly injections, we decided I needed another round of weekly injections for 8 weeks, blood test, and now I’m in the very bottom of the normal range. Like the exact number that is the start of the normal range. So we did a couple of more weekly injections, and now I have a couple of months of every other weekly injections. To see if that’ll get me levels better, or if I start to feel symptomatic again.
I hate needles, so all the blood tests I’ve been having this year on top of all the shots have not been an easy situation for me.
The picture above is one I took of my B12 shot supplies for a week.
Thankfully, I have to say that getting my B12 and iron levels up these past few months have helped me A LOT. Sure, I still have fibromyalgia, and at first when I was starting to feel better I wondered “has it really just been these two things for the past 14 years?” but I doubt it. The fibromyalgia symptoms are still there, it still takes me days to recover if I push too hard. I just don’t have heart pain trying to walk from the office to the bathroom. I can walk up the stairs, my feet and hands aren’t constantly cold, I don’t feel dizzy as often, I can eat and drink without choking! Finally!
Though now that I think about it, I wonder if the reason I was so unsteady with walking and managed to break my ankle in 2020 was a result of the B12. As unsteady gait is one of the symptoms. Honestly, my symptoms were getting so bad I was going to ask my doctor to check to see if I actually had MS. As the symptoms are similar.
Sadly, the cognitive problems with thinking, speaking, writing, and typing aren’t all the way better. It’s still a bit of a struggle at times to get thoughts into words that make sense, I still make typos more often than I used to, and sometimes I look at what I wrote and am really confused on how I wrote the words that very clearly came from my fingers and didn’t realize in the moment that something was happening. Then I might even forget what I was trying to say. It’s really frustrating, and sadly… since it got to that point… I am not sure if that’s actually fixable. I still have a lot of the neurological symptoms of my condition, which is called Pernicious Anemia.
Some sources I’ve read up say that it can take a couple of years for neurological effects to get better, and some places say that they might be permanent. So I guess we’ll have to see in the upcoming years just how I do with it all.
I hope you all are doing well! I plan to try and write more often here, at least once a week hopefully. I want to share more information about my health condition, life in general, the kids, the cats, the bird! I miss doing blog stuff and YouTube stuff even if I didn’t even do YouTube all that often. I’ve got ideas, and now that I’m starting to have some measure of energy and ability, I hopefully can get around to recording videos on top of writing more regularly! ♥
See you all around! ♥
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