If not, here's a brief recap:
- At age 21, I had pulmonary embolisms (blood clots in my lungs) and was later diagnosed with an incurable, rare kidney disease. It was treated, disappeared, returned, treated, disappeared and then returned again all over a span of 2 years. Then I met "Doc Hollywood", a young doctor who decided in 2001 that we should try something else and see if we could make the remissions last a bit longer...and it has not returned since. 12 years in remission on a prescription drug with virtually no side effects is truly a MIRACLE!
- 10 years ago (at age 25), I got an ear infection that seemed to muffle my hearing. After ignoring it for years and suffering over 50% in hearing loss, I finally had a stapedectomy on both ears in 2009. My hearing was restored to 90%!!! Truly another MIRACLE
Have you ever seen a 2 year old attempt to do one of those Connect the Dot pages in a coloring book? My youngest son was about 2 when he became obsessed with doing them. You can imagine what it all too often looked like. The "connections" were curved when they were supposed to be straight or completely straight when they were supposed to be curved. Sometimes the lines overlapped because he had missed a dot that he later went back to get.
And all this led to one thing, an unclear picture.
Well, that's kind of how my health dot to dot journey has been and continues to be. Sometimes straight lines end up curved and curved lines end up straight and the lines rarely line up to create a nice clear picture.
It gets tricky here because symptoms and issues that I dismissed as unrelated began to overlap with seemingly no common thread so the picture was unclear, and sometimes still is.
It was the summer of 2007. I had been working hard in our back yard to cut down and dig up a large fig tree and a scrappy little pecan tree cluster. Both were in spots that made it inconvenient to mow, which was irritating enough, but our dog also seemed to enjoy getting sick by eating the rotten fruits and pecans that fell to the ground. They had to go so I went out there with my normal gusto and began to cut and dig and pull and chop. I was surprised to find a strange vine like plant intertwined but didn't think much of it since it wasn't poison oak or ivy or sumac. I just immersed myself in the bushes determined to take them down...and so I did.
I remember coming in and thinking my arms were rather itchy but just attributed it all to the dirt and sawdust, nothing a good shower couldn't cure. But as I showered, welps like boils or blisters began to pop up on my arms. I thought it was weird because I honestly had never had any sort of allergic reaction on my skin to anything but figured it would just go away. I grabbed some Benadryl and waited for them to disappear...but they didn't. If anything, the blisters just kept swelling.
I had honestly never seen anything like it so I did what every intelligent person does, I googled it...NOTHING.
Surely if I couldn't google it, it didn't even exist, except it did. I could see them and feel them. The blisters were getting pretty uncomfortable as they continued to swell. I decided to do what I would do if it was a little blister on my hand so I took a needle and drained one. Clear liquid flowed out just like it would from any other blister and it felt better, so I drained all of them. Thinking that was the end of it, I went to bed that night only to be awakened by the distinct pressure of blisters on my arms. They had filled back up. I drained them again. They filled back up again.
I had no choice but to go to the doctor.
The look on the doctor's face when I showed him my arms was pretty discouraging. He asked me what I had gotten into and told me he had never seen anything quite like that...not really what you want to hear. He assumed it was some sort of allergic reaction and put me on a low dose of steroids, which cleared it right up. At home, we joked about it being my "grossness" but by in large it was an incident I forgot completely about. It was meaningless, right?
Or was it the catalyst for something else?
I looked down one day a year or so later and saw it...
the spot on my right hand...
the spot that lacked any color whatsoever.
At first, I assumed I had just gotten into something. After all, I was always getting into something when working on my projects and I was always working on a project. Maybe I had dropped some chemicals on my hand when I was remodeling or painting or gardening or something.
I was sure it was nothing until a few days later I looked down and saw another...
the spot on my right foot...
the spot that lacked any color whatsoever.
Once again, I did what any intelligent person from my generation does, I went straight to google and this is what I googled...
"Michael Jackson Skin Disease"
(I'm not really sure why I googled this. It seems like a bizarre thing to search but I remember with certainty typing it into the computer. Perhaps it was around the same time as his death and so he was all over the news. Really, idk so don't judge:)
the results popped up...VITILIGO.
I then began to research vitiligo and realized with almost certainty that I did indeed have Vitiligo and there was no real way to treat it or cover it up. The colorless spots would continue to appear...they continue to appear even now. When people ask me about the spots, I tell them that I have the same skin disease as Michael Jackson, which makes me almost famous...almost.
To say God has used Vitiligo to form me and change me would be a HUGE understatement. It has been absolutely transformational...
and not really in the way you may think...
or the way I feared at first.
Sidenote: I have a whole blog in my head about how transformational this has been in my mind and heart but want to stay focused on my health journey right now...it is definitely in the works though because this has been SERIOUSLY weighty stuff for me!
It was these colorless spots though that began to really spur me on.
It was here where I first began to start connecting all the health issue dots
(not vitiligo spots:)...
Dot #2 -Vitiligo is frequently classified as an autoimmune disease, the result of an overactive immune system where your immune system fails to recognize healthy cells and leave them alone but instead wages war and attacks. This is usually spurred on by some small, seemingly insignificant infection. (Remember the blisters?)
And that sounded all to familiar to me.
I would love to say that at this point in 2009, all of my health issues became crystal clear to me and I aligned them all under one umbrella and named it and became a part of some brilliant research study...
but I didn't.
It would take 2 more diagnoses for me to really begin to connect it all.
But I will tell you what continued to become clearer and clearer to me
God was using every little detail of my health journey to make me someone else,
someone He longed for me to be.
As my story was unfolding in ways I would not have written,
God was developing my character in ways I could not.
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