Medical Update

Just an update on my medical issues. The ortho doc called today with fantastic news and not-so-fantastic news. He took my case to the orthopedic surgeon and they think I'm a good candidate for the ceramic on ceramic total hip replacement!!! For those of you who don't know, ceramic hip replacements are relatively new, are believed to last up to 25 years in some cases, and are MUCH more durable than metal. SO! That means that in the VERY near future I will have a $50,000 wiggle!!! YAY! Now for the not-so-fantastic news which pushes the THR out of the spotlight for a little while in the doc's eyes. MY RIGHT HIP NOW HAS AVN!!!!!!! When the docs viewed my pelvic x-rays the right hip had significant AVN when just 6 months ago, IT DID NOT. Once it shows up on plain x-ray, AVN is pretty far advanced, but the doc still wants to get an MRI done on it to see how far along it actually is. There is a surgery that they can do called a core decompression IF it's caught early enough to try to give me more time until I need a THR on that hip as well. Core decompressions (CDs) are NOT always successful...in fact, MOST are not. And it of course is another surgery I will have to go through. My right hip is the docs' #1 priority at this point because if there is a way they can stave off a THR on that one, they will do it. So the THR on the left hip is going to be the last thing on their minds at this point! HA! Round and round we go! My fantasy of this being all over with after one surgery to my femur and one THR to my left hip and a couple of months recovery is blown to smithereens...and the doc pretty much set me straight on that the last time I was in the office. Even if the only surgery I had WAS the THR on my left hip, recovery could take up to a year. THR's on a person with AVN and THR's on a person with arthritis are totally different. I have a long way to go with this disease. And now it's in my right hip and there is a very good possibility that it could eventually be in my knees or shoulders or ankles down the road. But the good thing is that I have HELP NOW!! YAY! That's what is keeping me from tearing my hair out or telling them just to amputate already! : ) I'm so thankful that I have my family and friends around me for support. AND that I have plenty of pain meds to get me through the day! : ) Otherwise, I wouldn't be sitting here typing this out! It's going to be tough, and I will have days where I will scream and cry and say it's not fair and want to go jump off a cliff. But those days are luckily few and far between. I just gotta keep on going one day at a time! Love to all!

MareBear

Passion

What is it exactly that makes us fall in love, in passion, in infatuation...with a hobby, person, song, sight, smell? And I'm not talking about when we fall in love with our spouses or lovers or whatever you may have, although that fits into this as well...but I am talking about other people and things. When we meet a new friend or group of friends for instance. And you find that you talk like teenagers all night long and you just met. It's like falling in love. You get the excited feeling of wanting to talk to that person or those people every second of every day because you want to find out what else you can share with them. Or when you find out that you have the talent of playing the guitar by ear. You play every spare second you get until your fingers are raw and hurting but you keep playing. Eventually, those fingers are callused and you're writing your own songs. What happens when a certain song comes on the radio that you've never heard before and the words or the sound of the artist strikes a chord in you and your heart just wants to scream because it reminds you of a time in your life or someone who also made your heart want to scream or melt or burst? You go out and buy the CD and play the song over and over and over again until the emotion starts to fade. After a while, you stop playing it. But one day, months down the road, you'll turn on the radio and that song will come on, and you'll FEEL that song in the pit of your stomach just one more time. What IS that? And smell...what makes us remember the scent of someone that was so familiar to you over 10 years ago? A cologne of a man walking through a grocery store now could bring us to our knees. So we drink it in and try to hold it in our senses as long as we can and brreeeaaathhheee and just....remember. And there's sight. The other day I went out to an empty lot out in the country where they will be building a house eventually and it was dead silent. It was late afternoon and the sky was such a brilliant blue that there shouldn't even be a name for the color. The sky was so clear that you could see the moon. I stood in the middle of the clearing and turned in a full circle and looked at the tall trees towering around me. The sun was in the earliest stages of setting so the limbs of the trees took on a brilliant red color. And every part of my being wanted to stay there for the night...just so I could lay on a blanket in that clearing and look at the millions of stars that I knew would show up that night. My body SCREAMED to just snuggle up and take it all in.

My point to this is that why do we stop? What makes the passion fade? I'm sure...no, I KNOW that there are hundreds of books written on the subject. But I'm here to say, that I don't want mine to stop anymore. I don't want to stop getting the lurch in my stomach when my phone rings or my computer says one of my friends is online. I want to pick the guitar back up and never stop singing. I want to hear that song every day and not say, "OK, I'm getting tired of it now" when it used to make my heart skip a beat. I want to be able to recognize that cologne 20 years from now and still remember. I want to spend the night under the stars snuggled up and who gives a damn what I was supposed to be doing. I want to live for right now. I don't want to get used to it or bored with it...I want to live it, love it, and be passionately IN it right this very moment!

Since I didn't stay out in that beautiful place that day, I thought I'd share the pictures I took with you guys! And in case you didn't know this already, on most of the pictures on this blog, you can click on them and view them bigger on a separate page! Love to all!

Progress On New House

Here's the progress on the new house!

Here's ME outside the front of the house leaning on a sawhorse hoping I don't get splinters in my butt!! : ) What you don't see to my left is the HUGE dumpster that the workers are "supposed" to throw all their trash in. Unfortunately, most of it ends up all over our house and yard. Of course, until the house closes, it's technically not our house yet! ; )













Here is the front of the house. You can see how close the houses are together, but the backyards are far apart. Kind of like triangle lots. You can see the dumpster in this pic.










This is our cute kitchen...they just got done with the first coat of white paint on the cabinets. We will have stainless steel appliances. SWEET! Also, the countertops will be textured slate looking which will all look awesome!










This is just one angle of our backyard and as you can see it's a mess, and you can't really tell in this picture where our yard ends, but it's a pretty big yard, so the dogs are going to have a field day running around and playing! And Mom is going to LOVE pulling weeds all day. I just hope we'll be able to make her come inside when it gets dark every night!









Well, that's the house so far! We hope it will be done in the next 2 or 3 weeks!! YAY! We are all very excited about it. We HATE the apartment. ICK. And the dogs will have so much fun in the yard! Anyway, just wanted to give everyone the update!! Love to all always!

MareBear

Hair Fiasco

A while back...Mom and I had a girl's weekend when Dad went down to the coast. And me being the crazy hair dying woman that I am, I convinced mom to dye her hair red since I was going to do mine red. Well...Mom's hair was blonde at the time...as was mine. We got different shades of red and this is what the result was...

This is my orange hair which I could have gotten away with since it was Halloween coming up! Sexy, I think.






And THIS, would be Mom's hair....Purple or magenta...we couldn't quite decide. Needless to say, Halloween or no Halloween, I was the one who had talked her into dying her hair, and I was the one who was ordered out of the house to get cover up dye!






So, we got our hair fixed and we did it on our own without professional help! My once blonde mom now has UBER sexy dark hair! Everyone that sees her takes a minute to adjust and then LOVES it. And I have mahogany red hair that I love and hope to keep for a while. So, in the end it all worked out. But it was a TRUE Kodak moment watching Mom walk out of the bathroom with this haircolor...so I thought I'd share with everyone! Love to all!!

MareBear

Random Pictures

Here's me and Mom when I went to see her in NC. This was taken in one of those cute litte photo booths in the mall! Aren't we the cutest!

This is me and Dad again in NC. I'm totally diggin my red hair! That's why my hair is red, yet again! ; ) I love my daddy!

This is my fav pic of me and my parents. It was at my cousin's wedding a few years ago and I was a bridesmaid. I think we all look fabulous! : )

This is my Mom's dog Annie...or as I call her Fannie. She has cancer just like mom. : ( But she's doing well just like Mom too! : ) She's the cutest dog in the world but wow can she be a hell raiser!

This is Mom's dog Whitney. And guess what?! She has breast cancer TOO! But she's doing just fine as well. I took this picture while Mom was giving her a bath and it came out just like this. Pretty freaky I must say, but she really is the sweetest dog on the planet despite the devil's face! : )

This would be my dog, Sammy. He lives in B'ham with G. I'm not exactly sure what he was trying to do at the moment I took this picture but it makes me crack up every time I look at it so I thought I'd pass it on to all of you! He's a good pup!

Well, I just wanted to share a few pics with you guys. I don't incorporate them too much into my blog entries, so I figured I'd just make a whole entry of just pics! Peace out!

MareBear

Venting on Docs

Think for a moment if you would, that you were involved in the following scenario, and please give me feedback on how you would handle it.

I'm a 23 yr old girl that trusts doctors and naively believes that they all are going to do the best they can to help me, and inform me of everything I need to know. One day, I go to the doctor for a seemingly moderate but relentless upper respiratory infection. It WILL NOT go away. So I keep going back to this doctor. And every time I go, he gives me a little shot with a big dose of steroids in it. Little naive me has no idea the repercussions of that little shot every time I go in to see this doctor and this doctor fails to share them with me. So I just go along with it and go about my merry little way.

Fast forward to a year and a half and 80 pounds later. I have a MINOR fall at work and start having some MAJOR pain in my left knee and hip. I go to the worker's comp (WC) doctor to figure out what the heck is going on since I figured that I must have landed on my leg "just right." X-rays show nothing. But the WC doc feels around my knee he says, "I think you just have some tendonitis, let's give you a shot of steroids.........in your kneecap." OH BOY! Please?! Well, isn't this just the cat's ass. So, he gives me the most painful injection I've ever had in my entire life...yeppers...right into the hard bone of my knee cap. Well, that didn't fix the problem. SO, over the next 3 months and 2 more awful steriod injections in my knee cap, the brilliant doc decided to do an MRI. The MRI not only covered my knee but got just a tiny bit of my femur connected to my knee and thank GOODNESS for that. I waited all day long for the radiologist to read the results and when the WC doc came back in the room, he sat down in front of me. In all the visits that I had with him, this man NEVER sat down. I knew something was wrong. He stumbled over his words and told me something that for the rest of my life I will never forget. "You have a disease of the bone called Avascular Necrosis. It's when your bones literally die because of lack of blood supply. It's extremely rare. We saw holes in your femur right above your knee and it's probably affecting your entire femur, which is why you are having knee pain. It usually affects people's hips which is probably why you are having hip pain, but we didn't do a hip x-ray. Have you had any large doses of steroids recently as far back as two years?" Hmmmm. As I contemplated punching him, I said, "Why yes, yes I have." And I told him of the doc that had given me all the steroids that had not worked and had made me gain a crapload of weight and that I had later discovered was a quack. He says, "Well, there you go." He gives me a referral to an orthopedic doc and LOTS of pain medication while telling me that this disease is second in pain only to BONE CANCER and sends me home telling me that there isn't anything more he can do for me since this obviously wasn't work related anymore. Well, then.

So, I go to the first orthopedic doc who DOES do the first x-ray of my left hip which is BAD. It's already starting to show some collapse...that's right party people, in October of 2004, my hip was "starting" to collapse. Do the math. Anyway, he says that I have stage 3 AVN and that I should go home and pray about it because God heals. Well. I truly believe that God heals. I do. But I also believe that God put people on this Earth to become doctors and that they took a Hipocratic Oath to help me in my time of need. So, I took my crutches and x-rays, told that man he better not charge me for my visit (which he didn't) and went home to cry.

My job "asked me to resign" because it was a job at a hospital that required a lot of walking and it was a new job. I wasn't even done with my probation period and didn't even have my insurance yet, so I had to leave. I was in so much pain every day and the only "cure" for my disease was surgery so I couldn't find a full time job. And any insurance I could get on would consider my AVN a pre-existing condition and it would be a year before they would cover it. So, I go see a few more docs who all say that the only thing that will help me is a Total Hip Replacement because my hip is too far gone to do anything else. And they prescribed every medicine known to man and only ONE doctor prescribed Lortab (Hydrocodone). All the others were crap. There is a REASON that they make narcotics, people. Yes, they are strong. Yes, they can be addictive to SOME PEOPLE. I am not one of them. But it is the ONLY medicine that helps with my pain. And let me tell you, the pain is HORRIBLE. But yet, everytime I tell a doc that that's the only med that will help me, they look at me like I'm a drug seeker. They say they won't give it to me because they won't be responsible for a young girl getting addicted to pain meds. But yet, they've seen the x-rays. They've all oohed and aahed over them. They won't give me my surgery because I'm too young for that too! They say that if they replaced my hip now, then they'd have to replace it again in probably 20 years...and then again by the time I'm 60 or 65. And then, there might not be enough bone to work with, and I'd be in a wheelchair. Well, excuse the hell out of me, but what if I get hit by a bus in 10 years?!? I'd like to have 10 years of walking and running and working and playing and making love and bending over without wanting to cry and getting down on the floor and playing with the animals, and not worrying if my crutches or a motorized wheelchair is accessible if I get tired, and shopping till I DON'T drop and dancing the night away, and walking up stairs without using the railing, and taking a shower without using a shower stool, and putting on my pants without having to sit down to do it, and get in my car with out having to physically pick up my leg and put it in the car, and cancel plans with people because it's raining outside and I know if I go out I'll be hurting in an hour, or not making plans in advance because I don't know what my pain level will be that day.

So, these "doctors" are the ones telling ME that I can't do these things. Because they don't want to get sued when I'm 65. And they don't want me to have pain medication because they don't want me to sue them for being addicted to it. So, they say they want to do everything they can to help me, and instead, they've told me that not only are they going to not do the surgery, but they are not going to give me the only pain medication that will keep me out of pain. Does this make sense to anyone?

And this isn't just ONE doctor. And this hasn't just happened to ME alone. But it mostly happens to young people. And young people with a disease like mine. People with cancer can say, give me morphine...they get it. Or people with a broken hip can say give me surgery and they'll get it because it's an "emergency". But the docs don't seem to think that me walking around every day in horrible pain qualifies as poor quality of life. It sucks.

Now, in December of 2005, my left hip is considered totally collapsed and yet they still do nothing because I still "get around okay." But now that the cold weather has moved in, my pain is almost unbearable. But I deal with it. Every day. Every minute. Every second. Stop to think about that for just ONE second. If you've broken something. If you've burned yourself. If you've pulled a muscle or sprained an ankle. You know REAL pain. Try having that pain all the time...and there is NO getting away from it and NO ONE wants to help you and there was nothing you could do about it. Now try putting a smile on your face every single day. Now try not complaining about your pain. I do it every single damn day. EVERY DAY PEOPLE. I'm not talking about once a week I have a twinge of pain in my hip. Every day, every second, every single MOVE I MAKE. Try it...and then try to tell me everything's gonna be okay. I'm trying to get across to everyone how REAL this is. I don't have a visible disease except for a little limping. I don't have a disease with a well-known name like CANCER. I don't have a disease that will kill me. So my disease gets ignored by these doctors who don't want to get sued because they don't know enough about this disease. Even though my disease is one of the most painful ones out there. And they don't live inside my body every second feeling my pain and my muscles atrophy and my back spasms and my hip popping and my femur giving out from under me. So I have to be quiet?

So, the reason for this rant is because I woke up this morning with really bad pain. And tomorrow I am supposed to go back to see the ortho doc. I have no idea what he wants to see me about. Maybe they've all talked it over and are sick of hearing me kvetch about it and will give me the surgery or a lifetime supply of pain pills. I will keep you all informed. Feel free to comment. But whatever you do, BE YOUR OWN ADVOCATE WHEN IT COMES TO YOUR HEALTHCARE! These doctors DO NOT know everything. DO RESEARCH. Lots of orthos didn't even know what my disease WAS when I first got this because it was so rare. Just keep your eyes open!

Peace and love always!

Mare Bear