Since being before I was diagnosed with diabetes, I have had nerve pain that can be excruciatingly painful. Occasionally it lasts four hours on end and is almost debilitating. Luckily it happens in the evenings so it doesn’t influence work that much and is much worse when I am tired.
Over the years I have been prescribed Oxycontin and Gabapentin to try to deal with the pain. Oxycontin upset my stomach and made me depressed and emotional all of the time. While it is quite addictive, I hated it and it didn’t really do anything so I quit them within a couple of weeks of taking them. Gabapentin is an anti-epileptic seizure drug that is supposed to coat the brain receptors. It gave me phantom feelings and while it allowed me to ignore the seizure warnings of some video games with a fair degree of confidence, the phantom feelings were a pain in the neck to deal with and they made my brain feel like my feet were a different shape than what they are. That was not a lot of fun to deal with and I quit taking those. Neither one of them made the pain any more tolerable and I lost the feeling that I had a growth on my left elbow as well.
Things were kind of manageable until last year when I started to stumble every couple of months without any reason. I do tend to be a little clumsy but I kept falling to my left hand side. Not every day or every week but often enough that I realized that I was stumbling to my left once in a while. There wasn’t any rhyme or reason to it as I could play basketball or some pickup hockey and not have any issues but every once in a while I found myself eating some drywall.
At the time I got my iPod Touch, I was shocked that I couldn’t operate it with my left hand. My left hand would not respond to it. While I am naturally left handed, my right hand was working better than my left one. I finally made an appointment to see my family doctor who when he asked what else was wrong I mentioned my left eye was changing as well. We looked at an eye chart and while I still have 20/20 vision, I pointed out that the big E at the top was blurry. Since then I noticed that my left eye isn’t focusing that well. I can’t describe it other than saying that
My family doctor referred me to a neurologist who ordered a bunch of tests. Today was that day of tests. I hate neurology tests. I am not sure if there is one that doesn’t hurt and I am not sure what doing the exact same painful action accomplishes but they did it today. If there a test that doesn’t hurt, they never gave it to me today. I did find out that my nervous system is breaking down more. Why they aren’t so sure of yet. I found out I have a bunch more tests. Of course the question of what is happening with my left eye is another issue for another day.
I am a big fan of the Canadian health system, it has been good to my family but I do understand why wealthy Canadians get their health care in the United States. It’s the waiting that is so frustrating in the Canadian system. Wait to an appointment to a specialist, wait for tests, wait for a second opinion on the tests. We wait and wait and wait which is what I get to do some more of. This is one of the trade offs of a public system I guess. There is no incentive to make it go faster.
The positive is that I don’t feel that bad right now. I had a bad night the other night but other than that, I don’t feel that bad. I slept soundly for the first time in weeks this afternoon which improves the mood as well. I hope they find out what the problem is sooner rather than later but whatever it is, I have it already so it isn’t as if that part will change and time will tell if it is beatable.
The negative is that even this morning I was hoping someone would say it was stress or fatigue that was causing this and a couple days off would make it go away. Maybe an increase in my diabetes dosage. I hate it when someone takes away my blissful ignorance away.
I’ll be praying for you.
Jordon,
Thanks for the report. I hate it that your diabetes has caused such problems. Wish there were more solutions for you.
May God walk very closely with you as you go through this.