Mrs. Ram's Jams

  • Home
  • About
  • Contact
  • Category: chronic pain

    • My New Normal: Meniere’s Disease

      Posted at 6:47 pm by Mrs. Ram Jam, on October 14, 2017

      Even though Chronic Pain Awareness Month is over, this week I officially received a new chronic disease diagnosis:  Meniere’s disease. I’m aware-ing ya’ll again of another chronic disease and of my new normal. Hopefully, this post will prove cathartic in nature.

      The Mayo Clinic defines Meniere’s disease as “a disorder of the inner ear that causes episodes in which you feel as if you’re spinning (vertigo), and you have fluctuating hearing loss with a progressive, ultimately permanent loss of hearing, ringing in the ear (tinnitus), and sometimes a feeling of fullness or pressure in your ear. In most cases, Meniere’s disease affects only one ear.”

      My ENT introduced this disease to me a year and a half ago.

      Before taking Little Thing to Disney World last year during Mardi Gras break, my ears started hurting. I felt pressure, sliding, popping, stabbing, and ringing. My right side was worse, and my hearing sounded muffled. The pain was present upon waking and worsened while riding in a car, becoming quasi unbearable while in the driver’s seat. The doctor treated me with steroids and told me to call her if my symptoms relapsed.

      My symptoms vanished but returned a month later. I went back for a hearing test, discovering I had lost a low level pitch in my right ear. That’s when my ENT brought up Meniere’s. It’s uncommon, but fibromyalgia sufferers can get it. At that point, it wasn’t a diagnosis. I hadn’t experienced any vertigo, so she presented it as atypical Meniere’s disease. Again, she treated me with steroids and suggested a low sodium diet to help manage symptoms.  

      This April, my symptoms flared again but with a twist.  

      On the Friday of spring break (Little Thing was at Granny’s), I hopped on the interstate. About ten minutes into my drive, dizziness set in–not full blown vertigo but imbalance and lightheadedness. I began shaking and sweating. Nauseous and spinning, I exited the interstate and parked at a grocery store for twenty minutes until my world stopped rotating. Getting on the interstate again wasn’t an option, so I drove a little further on once I felt better. It was too soon. I stopped again.  

      I called my husband. Terrified, he left work, picked me up, and drove me to the emergency room. They couldn’t tell me what was wrong.

      In a matter of days, my ears rebelled, and I developed a sinus infection. When I felt safe enough to get back on the road, my dizziness wasn’t nearly as bad, but something felt off. Then, Meniere’s came to my mind.  

      I went back to the ENT. I got better but avoided interstate driving, the apparent previous attack trigger.

      Over the summer, I performed a four hour test that tested my eyes, ears, and balance. Once more, she told me she couldn’t say that it was Meniere’s, but she couldn’t write it off.      

      Through an MRI, she also discovered that I had a deviated septum and inflamed sinus cavities, so I had a septoplasty and sinus surgery to help alleviate symptoms.

      I was feeling glorious ala Macklemore featuring Skylar Grey style up until a few weeks ago when we drove to Illinois for a quick weekend. We were in the car for four days and at the mercy of sodium saturated fast food and roadside restaurants.  

      To give my husband a break from driving on day two, I gave up shotgun and tried to chauffeur as we entered Missouri. Bad idea–the hilly ups and downs combined with the speed and salt intake triggered a mild attack.  

      On the way back to Louisiana, my ears revolted.   

      I found myself in my ENT’s office this week still in pain and lightheaded.

      She informed me we had to get my Meniere’s under control–no more this might be what you have, but a definitive yes.  

      So what’s my new normal?  It’s a low sodium diet and water pills.  It’s no driving on the interstate or for extended periods of time until it gets under control.

      When I’m in a flare like I am now, thirty minutes of city driving pushes it, the ear pain radiates incessantly, and my hearing undulates.  

      My anxiety level has escalated, but I’m dealing with it. An aspect of my independence gets snatched away during a flare.  I am rendered more unreliable to keep prior commitments.  Once easy rides, getting to work, navigating primary school carpool, and driving home are now chores.

      My description of Meniere’s barely breeches basic understanding.  In no way have I described its full aspects.  And like my previous post about pain (Chronic Pain Awareness), I’m not writing to complain; I’m writing to inform.

      And of course to cope.  

      Thanks for reading.

      Works Cited:

      https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/menieres-disease/basics/definition/con-20028251

      Posted in chronic pain, fibromyalgia, Uncategorized, writing | 2 Comments | Tagged chronic pain, chronic pain awareness month, dizzy, driving with pain, ear pain, meniere's disease, pain awareness, vertigo, writing
    • Chronic Pain Awareness

      Posted at 11:46 pm by Mrs. Ram Jam, on September 7, 2017

      September is Pain Awareness Month, so this invisible pain sufferer is heralding awareness to y’all that chronic pain is not fake news nor alternative fact.

      According to research provided by John Hopkins University economists, chronic pain cost the US as much as $635 billion in 2012; that’s more than diabetes, cancer, and heart disease COMBINED in one year. This statistic dropped my jaw.  

      Chronic pain is real and often gets overshadowed. And in the case of fibromyalgia, from which I suffer, some people in this world choose to believe that it isn’t real, it exists in sufferers’ heads, and/or we make it worse for ourselves.

      Mrs. Ram owns every glorious facet of her portrayed and contained crazy, but she is a rational, educated Homo sapien sapien and has ample cognitive capacity to recognize her pain is real–as well as a medical diagnosis and medical fact to prove it. Choosing to eschew medical fact over personal beliefs about someone else’s pain is delusional. Why demean someone else’s pain?  

      I am not writing this to vehemently complain about my widespread body woes.

      I am writing this to help normalize chronic pain in society.

      I am writing this to help end strangers’, friends’, and even family members’ verbal and silent shaming of sufferers who battle it everyday. (Thankfully, my family is very understanding.)

      I am doing this in an attempt to stop shaming myself.

      Yes, I shame myself for having a chronic pain disease.  

      You would too if you had one like fibromyalgia.

      Some days it hurts to have clothes on. Some days it takes me three hours to recover from a shower. Some days it’s pins and needles, stabbing and spasms, or sweats and chills. Some days my right side doesn’t do what I ask of it, or I’m off-balance and dizzy. Interrupted sleep plays a big role in function, too. Don’t forget the anxiety or the fibro fog. Some days it’s none of the above, one or five of the above, or every damn one.   

      To top it all off, I’m overwhelmingly sensitive to heat, cold, sounds, smells, food, and medicine. Yes, this is part of the disease, too. I can’t take most medicines to help treat my disease because it throws my other troublesome chronic pain culprits (IBS and Raynaud’s) into a two-year-old style induced hissy fit. Frequently, sensitivity blends into blatant intolerance and vengeful malaise ensues.  

      Some days fibromyalgia is debilitating. Some days I’m borderline non-functional. Most days I can dab, whip, and nae nae through the background music of pain, and some days I feel wonderful.  

      This doesn’t begin to eclipse everything that’s attributed to my disease or anyone else’s version of fibromyalgia. Fibro varies from person to person.

      Sometimes I can handle everything on my daily docket, and sometimes I stay home and miss out on scheduled activities. And sometimes, not all the time, people don’t understand why.

      It is not just nausea, sweats, stomach aches, moderate fatigue, or insert the name of any other symptom here. When I end up saying no or backing out, I am either already in an extreme amount of pain or know that going will push me there.

      It is not normal pain, and some people just don’t understand.   

      Are you starting to see why I shame myself?  

      As a sufferer of invisible illness, it feels like most empathy in this world is reserved for accidents, murders, life-threatening illnesses, or the terminal cases.  

      Society’s way of saying, “Hey Chronic Pain Sufferer, you have no risk of dying, so we can only empathize with the most traumatic, shattering aspects of the world’s chaotic crosshairs.”

      Society’s apathy contaminates sufferers own views of their diseases because sufferers empathize with more tragic plights in this world: hurricanes, poverty, famine, and other chronic national and global issues. But that does not make our daily pain less or less real.

      Irma’s threatening Florida, and here Mrs. Ram jams about chronic pain. What an ass (instead of ram?) I am. That’s my point. Chronic pain will always be overshadowed by disasters or accidents more devastating.  

      Empathy is not a finite resource. Understanding works just like love. This world deserves more of both.

      Chronic pain will remain invisible if sufferers don’t raise their voices, and I refuse to remain silent.  

      Works Cited

      American Pain Society. “Chronic pain costs U.S. up to $635 billion, study shows.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 11 September 2012. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/09/120911091100.htm>.

      Posted in chronic pain, fibromyalgia, Uncategorized | 9 Comments | Tagged chronic pain, fibromyalgia, pain awareness month
    Newer posts →
    • Search

    • Recent Posts

      • A Mrs. Ram’s Jams Guide to Grading Papers at Home October 19, 2019
      • September 2019 Mini Book Reviews October 4, 2019
      • One Sentence Story with Daily Word Prompts: Initial, Umbrage, and Languor September 28, 2019
      • A Poem: English Class Will Never Be Baseball September 21, 2019
      • A Mrs. Ram’s Jams Teaching Tale: Reading Comprehension Fails in The Odyssey September 15, 2019
      • Mini Book Reviews for August 2019 September 7, 2019
      • A Mrs. Ram’s Jams Tale: What I Bought Versus What I Got–Llama Dress Edition August 31, 2019
      • A Poem: You’re the Apple of my Eye, Phone August 24, 2019
    • Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

      Join 263 other followers

    • Follow Mrs. Ram's Jams on WordPress.com

Blog at WordPress.com.