Health.
It’s truly something that I feel most of the time I have taken for granted; the ability to take my dogs on a walk on a beautiful summers night, or the ability to go workout and believe that my body could accomplish whatever it needed to accomplish.
Over the course of the past two weeks, my health has been something I have constantly been thinking about.
On Thursday, April 27th, I started to experience tingling and numbness in my right fingers and hand. I thought maybe I had slept on it wrong and wasn’t super concerned.
I had driven to KC for my cousins wedding that following Friday, and on Saturday morning was her wedding. As I was showering that morning of the wedding, I noticed that the numbness had moved up my entire right arm. I started to get more concerned but tabled those thoughts for the time being.
On that following Sunday, I decided to go to an Urgent Care in KC to have it looked at. The urgent care doctor became concerned that it could be a blood clot, and so they told me to go to the emergency room.
While I was in the emergency room, they did a CT of my lungs and my head, looking for any signs of a blood clot, along with an Ultrasound of my entire right arm.
Once they received the results, they came in to tell me that they had not been able to identify any sort of blood clots, so they sent me home.
On Tuesday night, I came back to Castle Rock, and noticed that the bottom of my foot had become slightly numb. The next morning, I realized that now not only was my right foot numb, but also my entire leg. At that point I was very concerned as to why now my entire right side of my body was numb, and was concerned as to why the numbness was not going away.
I decided to look into a chiropractor, thinking maybe it was just a pinched nerve. I went in on Wednesday and Friday to a chiropractor, and while I was in on Friday, the chiropractor really urged me to go back in and get everything checked out again because typically a pinched nerve only affected your arm or your leg, but typically not both.
With this new information, Drew decided to drive me to the ER again. While I was in there, the emergency doctor decided to do an MRI of my spine and my brain.
Then the scary news came.
“Well we found a lesion on your brain and two lesions on your spine, which is a strong indication of MS. You are at the right age too when MS starts affecting people.”
Obviously this type of diagnosis was never one that even remotely crossed my mind, so I was in complete shock when they informed me of this.
They decided to admit me to the hospital for further testing and examination, and to have the neurologist come talk with me the following morning.
As I was speaking with the neurologist, he specified that he felt pretty confident that it was Relapsing Remitting MS or RRMS and that the numbness I was experiencing was my first flare up.
Thankfully I was released today, but this is just the beginning of this journey. I will be reaching out to an MS specialist to learn more about next steps and treatment plans. This is sadly a disease that currently has no cure, but they do have medications that can help to keep things at bay and allow for me to not let my lesions grow anymore.
This will be a very long journey, as I may have to experience this the rest of my life, but I have always been a fighter and one to stand up to any fight that comes my way, so I’m ready to kick some MS Booty.
I have been so incredibly grateful for my amazing support system thus far. For my amazing and wonderful fiancé, who stayed with me in the ER until 3:30 in the morning and ran to bring me back clothes so that I could be comfortable in my hospital room, and for truly being my rock through it all. And for my amazing church family through Meadows Church that each took time to see how I have been doing. All of my family, and so many KC friends/family that offered multiple times to drop everything and drive to Castle Rock to be with me. And to my amazing work, and the sweetest CEO bringing me the most beautiful flowers and checking in on me!! And of course for all of the amazing doctors and nurses that took care of me this past weekend and really showed the level of care I needed to get through such difficult news. I feel so lucky to be surrounded by so many amazing people!
I will continue to update as I learn more, and will be happy to listen to anyone that is struggling with something similar! We are in this together and we can and will get through this!! And if you have anything similar going on, always always trust your gut! Because I promise you are not crazy and your body is definitely trying to tell you something!!
