I really don't think I'll post many jornal entries (too much to rant about), but what I'd like to do now is just to let my friends who don't already know about it know why I seemingly dissapeared off the face of the Earth for so long, and get a chance to tell my story.
Like I might have mentioned before, I’ve been extremely sick for a long time. It’s been maybe two or three years since this all got set into motion, but, as of July 05' It’ll be more than a year since the worst part of it happened. Around Jan 05, I’d just gotten over being in the hospital from having an infection, a very, very painful infection, caused by my diabetes (I may have mentioned before that I’m diabetic). I’d had a few infections like this before, caused by my being stupid and not taking care of myself and always having super-high blood sugars. I admit, for years I’ve been very bad about taking care of my condition and slacking off, and just not getting how serious it is. Well, finally something hit home and I decided I couldn’t live like that anymore, having these awful infections and always being sick and tired all the time. So I started doing what I was supposed to do, taking my insulin and monitoring my blood sugar more carefully. Then one day I noticed I had a little bit of pain on the skin in my stomach area, almost like a sunburn kind of pain. I really didn’t think anything of it at first, until it started to spread. By November the pain had spread to my entire body and gotten much worse. Imagine the worst sunburn you’ve ever had, and now imagine it everywhere, head to toe, front and back, no way to turn yourself to relieve the burning sensation. I stopped wearing clothes, I had to sleep in satin sheets (when I could sleep), and even the weight of the sheet on my body was absolute torture. And the pain varried; sometimes it felt like burning, sometimes like needles being jabbed into me, sometimes more of an electric kind of pain. This went on 24/7 with no relief except sleep. I basically shut down completely and stopped living. I shut myself up in my room, hardly ever coming out except to go to the bathroom and for food, and I barely ate one small meal a day at that point and sometimes not at all. I weighed only 97 lbs. at my lowest (right now I’m back up a little). I looked worse than Nicole Richie heh heh ^^ kidding. But really, I just looked gross, nothing but bones, but I just couldn’t eat because the pain was so all encompassing, plus I’d just plain given up on living. I couldn’t have cared less if I starved to death. The only time I left the house was to see doctors. Tons of doctors, and none of them knew what was wrong with me. Some thought it could all be in my head (I wanted to shoot those doctors), but most of them suspected diabetic neuropathy. Yes, I thought you’d ask that. Diabetic neuropathy is damage to the nerves caused by too much sugar in the blood. The only thing is with neuropathy is it usually is only in the hands and feet, whereas mine was total body, and wasn’t crippling like mine had become. So on top of everything I had no answers, and naturally I was scared to death that this thing I had would never go away. At my very worst point I was in my bed all the time, not wanting to move or have anything touch me, often sick to the point of throwing up, crying a good portion of the day (for at least six months I don’t think I went one day without crying), sometimes screaming when no one else was home, on every single painkiller you can think of short of morphine (and none of them worked), just praying for sleep, and, yes, sometimes praying for death. I was in such horrible pain and I didn’t know if it would ever get better, so I just wanted to die. Eventually I ended up at St. Joseph’s for a few days in the mental ward because everyone was afraid I was suicidal.
I guess I was in what people would call “my darkest hour.” I’m crying right now as I write just thinking of it. The only thing that got me though all of it was my family, especially my mother, who was there for me every step of the way. They even pooled together (“they” being my mom, my aunts Candy and Lynette, and my grandma) and got me an insulin pump. It really is the coolest thing. It acts like my pancreas would and gives me steady insulin and calculates how much I need for what I eat and stuff like that. It’s been a total lifesaver. Still, I only wished to be out of my misery, or at least to have some medical explanation as to why this was happening. Then one day my counselor who I was seeing gave me the number of a woman who she’d worked with some years ago who she remembered having the same symptoms I was describing. Her name was Cheryl. So I called and talked to her on the phone and she told me she had also been diabetic (she’s not anymore; she had a pancreas transplant), and she’d also been pretty non-compliant and then had the problem with the burning skin pain like me and that she knew a doctor at Rush University Hospital that could probably help me. Then, out of nowhere she offers to take me to this doctor and pay for the visit, just like that. And this is the first time I’d ever even talked to this woman, not even in person, and she does this wonderful thing for me. I cried and just thanked God over and over all that night because now I had some hope, and Cheryl also told me that the pain she’d experienced had gone away with this doctor’s help. I pretty much think of her as my guardian angel now ^^
That was the start of my recovery. Cheryl, my mother, and I all met and as she was telling me her story I felt as if I was listening to myself talking. The things she described were almost exactly the same things as I’d gone through, from the pain to the depression, all of it. I felt 90% better just having someone to relate to. That was one of the hardest things, that, even though my family was supportive and loved me and all, they still had no idea what I was going though and just didn’t understand how I felt. Having found someone else who’d been though the same hell as I had and had come out the other side intact did a lot for my spirits. We went to Rush shortly after and I saw the Doc who finally had some answers for me. He told me that what I had (and I’ll try to explain this the best I can) was a form of temporary neuropathy that was brought on by the absence of sugar in my blood. For years I’d had a blood sugar level that was abnormally high and I’d been that way for so long that when I at last started being compliant with my diabetes and taking care of myself the right way, my sugar levels came back down into the normal range, which is good, but the problem was my body was so used to such high levels that when I came back to normal again it sent my system into shock, basically frying my nerve endings and screwing up my whole body. Now when he’d seen Cheryl, she’d been where I was when I’d been at my worst, so he’d put her in the hospital and tried to flush out her system with fluids and stuff, but by the time he saw me I was already starting to feel a little bit better, although I still hurt a lot and I still didn’t know what the hell it was I had so I’m glad I saw him, but that I was over the worst of it and it was only a matter of riding it out now, and that it would go away. It’s been agonizingly slow going, but today I'm almost 100% better. I still am a little bit sensitive and have some trouble getting to sleep, but I can wear clothes again without it bothering me and I can move around like normal and do things I just didn’t have the will to do before. Simple things like just getting out of my room and driving to town and playing with my new kitty (yep, I got a new little kitten named Lucy ^_^ She’s such a cute little brat) is a major step for me. And I’ve got my appetite back finally. I’m still going to counseling since, while I’m physically getting better, emotionally I may take much longer to heal.
Well, that’s my long, unhappy tale, and believe it or not that was the short version. I know, I really sounded dramatic there, but honestly I’m not exaggerating how bad it was. It took a long time coming back to life. The reason I haven’t kept in touch or talked to anyone even online much is when you go through something like that you just stop caring about anything except the pain. It’s all you can focus on. Plus I just didn’t want anyone to know how awful a situation I was in. It was bad enough seeing what my family was going through watching me suffer, how much it hurt them, so of course I didn’t want to drag any of my friends into it too. Of course I didn’t draw for about two years either, and I’m just now finding some joy in doing that again. Art used to be my therapy, but I was just in so much pain I didn’t even like to move my arm to pick up a pencil, and I was into that whole ‘what’s the fucking point?’ mind frame. I honestly can say that I thought I was going to die, one way or another, so why would I want to draw anything? I was just in such a terrible depression, I don’t even know how I got through it -_- Not gracefully, I can tell you that, but I DID get through and that’s the important thing.
Nowadays I’m trying to catch up on a ton of things, including contacting all my online friends again and trying to explain that, no, I was NOT kidnapped by aliens for three years, I was just really sick. I’m also drawing and realizing how much I missed it ^^ I’m working in Photoshop a lot these days (thanks to Cynicallia). I have no job or anything, but I’m looking and I still want to go to college. I’m going to try not to waste anymore time, cause, cliché as it may be, it really is true that life is short. Believe me I know it.