Week One~ Update

Week one of antibiotics-- it’s no piece of cake…but then again, I’m not too fond of cake, so maybe it is like that. It certainly isn’t like a good scone and Stumptown latte ;) Not fun, not pleasant. It’s stressful and exhausting. Hard to believe this is only the very beginning. I wonder how people make it through this, but I know they do. It took my mom and I a couple hours to just try to organize all the medications into spreadsheets, a time schedule, and then into boxes and boxes of pill sorters. With food, without food. Once a day, three times a day, away from vitamins, refrigerated. Oy vey! The liquid drops, powders, and nearly 50 pills a day I take are increasingly time consuming. But if it were only the pains of taking medicine, I don’t think I would wonder so much how people get through this. It’s being trapped in a body that’s being massacred by strangely intelligent little parasites. And it’s a heart that’s breaking over the moments, the opportunities to live, that are seemingly slipping away.

In this first week, the exhaustion and pain have increased as I suppose we expected. Burning and stabbing pains in my hips, knees, and shoulders are new pains though. I can’t stop my right arm and hand from shaking. The hot and cold sweats are new too—hot flashes at 24? Really?! Nausea all day. And then there’s the loss of my brain and skin. Every other minute it seems I forget what I was thinking about. No more multitasking, or anything that requires too much brain power for that matter. As for the loss of my skin…it’s not literal obviously, but it feels as if it is. Everything I touch hurts as if I had no skin or perhaps like it’s all just bruised. I struggle to fall asleep at night because it hurts when my knees touch, or when the seam of my tank top rubs against my skin. I can’t lean back in a chair and know that even a hug from a friend will hurt. In the end, the comfort of a hug always outweighs its pain though.

I guess maybe there was a hopeful, although slightly delusional, part of me that thought I could begin all this and keep living my life as I did last week—that it would take awhile for the effects to kick in. Hopefully this just means it’s working faster, right?! But I’ve successfully made it through the first week(!) and look ahead to step into the next. Thank you all for your continued prayers& love& support.

With Love—
Samantha