At the start of this blog, I had mentioned that we would go back into Sam's life and tell about the beginnings and our trails and errors along the way of learning the correct diagnoses of MSA. We will go back off and on throughout the next several months and enter excerpts of the last ten years, in between the blogs of our day to day occurrences and developments.
Lets go back ten years now, to a fairly young and vital, full of life Sam..barely 40 years old. I know, those of you that know of MSA or any other forms of Parkisonism Plus know that the usual onset of symptoms are around 50. Some of us just age quicker I guess due to all sorts of factors in our life. Ten years ago, Sam started having pain in her legs, debilitating pain that caused her to not be able to walk much. She ended up in a wheel chair back then as they learned of her issues and tied it into a diagnoses of Hep C and neuropothy. During this time, she also went through a divorce and we watched a healthy young Sam dwindle away to a tiny 115 pounds. Something was definitely wrong and we didn't see that it was more than what they told it to be, we had no idea. She had been given only six months or so to live. After her appointment where they told her of this diagnoses, we went out to the local botanical gardens. I will never forget the conversation that went on. She asked that I be an emergency guardian of her children when the time came and to take over the tasks needed to get her children to her family in Florida and take care of her affairs. That was a very emotional time in our lives. How do you deal with a terminal illness of one so young and so quick?
Over the next year, many things began to happen as she became totally dependant on her daughter and I for all of her movement needs. Next in that year came the blood disorder, her PT/INR (blood counts for clotting factors) dropped dramatically and she began to throw clots in her lungs and heart. Daily shots of blood thinner that she gave herself in the stomach became a part of life. After the first year, a wonderful method we learned of called rhyzotomies came into the picture. This is a method that a shot is put into the nerves in the spine to block or kill off receptors so that pain could be managed (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhizotomy). After several treatments, it was a raging success and Sam continues on with her life with careful consideration that she couldn't feel as much and had to be careful not to hurt herself because she wouldn't know it and her blood levels could cause her to bleed out. Next question came as to where the Hep C came from. Well, it seems that twenty years prior to her first onset of symptoms, she was in a very bad car accident that required life saving blood transfusions and it was a time before it was common practice to screen blood donors for this disease. Lovely, our luck is just as we call it...if it wasn't for bad luck there would be no luck at all. A somewhat normal life ensued for several years to come after getting back out of the wheelchair. Sam went on to finish raising her children, a beautiful daughter who is now in nursing school and a wonderful son that has served several missions with the military during our war time. Sam also became a service manager for a local big chain restaurant, went on to college herself seeking degree in social work and started dating again. That is our Sam, always the fighter, always defying those odds. Fight on Mrs. Trooper, fight on!
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