What a Trip

Three days, approximately 72 hours since my last steroid infusion and I can honestly say that I feel I am emerging from the depths of my own private purgatory. All in all, I've been in hell since Wednesday night, five days, five whole days that I never want to relive EVER. It amazes me that my doctor looked me in the eye as I asked for a rundown of the side-effects of the IV infusions and he said "oh nothing." Hmmm, maybe he should try it sometime. I dare him.

The first infusion brought agonizing muscle pain, so I wised up with the second and came home and just didn't move. The less i moved, the less pain I was in. By that night the tears had started. The third day of infusion ended with horrible squeezing chest pain and difficulty breathing and I walked out with tears streaming down my cheeks, not just from the pain, not just because this whole situation was difficult but from an absolute sense of desolation. A sense that my life would be changed irrevocably from this moment forward and how bleak an outlook it had. I have thought on a few occasions over the years that I may be suffering from mild depression...now I know better. When you can look at your beautiful, innocent daughters and think will all sincerity that they would be better off without you in their lives, you know you've sunk to the inky black depths. I can handle the muscle pain, I can handle the constant headache, stomach ache, thirst, tiredness...I can even handle the scary, squeezing chest pain that made a second appearance on Saturday...all easy compared to the mind bending trip that I endured. I barely moved all weekend. If asked too much I would snap! If given to much time to think I would cry. I read Twilight in it's entirety from Saturday to Sunday in the hopes of keeping my mind occupied with something else. I got up on Sunday determined to feel better. I asked Alex to take me to Starbucks to get some coffee and a scone. An effort to find some normalcy that failed miserably as I barely touched either of them. I cried most of the way home Sunday afternoon. I told Alex I was sorry that he married me. Sorry that I was broken and he was having to take on the care of the girls. I told him that I thought it was unfair of them to have me as a mother, broken as I am. What will happen in the future? How can I possibly be the mother they need? I woke this morning and the tears were gone but the melancholy lingered. The girls ran around and watched TV all day as I lay on the couch, buried in the second book of the Twilight series. I made their breakfast, I made their lunch. I comforted them when needed, I craddled, changed, cajoled, cleaned and generally tended to them with everything that I had in me...I felt guilty still that I just wasn't me.

Finally, finally, finally, after dinner, on the way to Wal Mart to get a sharps container for the injections I start tomorrow I felt the light come in again. I felt some hope, some sense that my future wasn't penetrated with doom. Some sense that I wasn't shackled as tightly to this disease as my mind had led me to believe for the last several days. What a relief. What an awful head trip.

This week should be much easier. I meet the nurse tomorrow and start my injections which gives me hope that I will not have to go through this sort of experience again for a long time. I also have my MRI tomorrow night to find out if there has been any disease progression...I'm thinking there must have been with the optic neuritis...we shall see how bad though...and then...nothing...sweet, blissful, calm, nothing. I can hardly wait.