I am not your fairy tale miracle cure story.

But more on that in a minute.

In the past couple years, I’ve been quietly preparing to die.  I hadn’t told anyone the full extent of what was going wrong with my body, because it was inexplicable.  Whenever I aspirated and got an infection, I became much weaker than the infection should have made me.  Sometimes I became severely weakened by stress alone.  I knew that there was something going on above and beyond the medical conditions we were aware of.  But I also knew that my symptoms could come from so many different things, it was unlikely we’d ever find it, or that it would be something treatable.

In parts of the chronic illness community, people use a term called ‘spoons’ to describe how much energy you have to do basic things.  I have mixed feelings about the idea, and the Spoon Theory story that originated the practice.  But sometimes it’s a useful thing.  What happened when I got sick was that my spoons would go negative.

When I say negative spoons, I’m not just saying I really didn’t have much energy.  I don’t mean that I felt sick and tired in any way that even the average chronically ill person feels sick and tired.  I mean that I felt like my level of energy was spiraling downwards in a dangerous way.  Where the less energy I had, the less energy I had to replenish it.  At my worst, I would be lying in a hospital bed, going in and out of delirium, and in lucid moments I would notice that it took too much energy just to keep my heart going.  I’d wish that I could stop and rest.  And then I’d realize what that meant.

When I was not acutely ill, I had a constant, subtle sense of fragility.  It felt like one good illness could put me in the hospital or kill me.  And often it did.  I had four hospitalizations between late 2012 and early 2013.  More recently, I was having periods of time when for no reason at all, I’d become unable to move or stay conscious for long.  I knew something was badly wrong.  And apparently so did my doctor, because he started sending me to more specialists and running tests.

This was the result:

Results of cortisol tests, showing cortisol too low to measure, ACTH too low to measure, and cortisol rising up to 8 and 9 when my system was artificially flooded with ACTH.

What does this mean?  When they measured the level of cortisol in my blood, it was consistently too low to be measured.   ACTH is a hormone secreted by the pituitary gland that tells the adrenal glands to make cortisol.  My ACTH was too low to be measured as well.  When they flooded my system with ACTH, I made some cortisol, but not as much as they might have expected.

And what does that mean?  It means that my pituitary gland isn’t making enough ACTH, and hasn’t been for a long time.  And that my adrenal glands have therefore not been making enough cortisol.  I have something called severe secondary adrenal insufficiency.  We don’t know the cause yet.  But the upshot is that it’s extremely treatable.  I’m on a steroid called dexamethasone, that replaces the cortisol my body can’t make.

That health crash I had six years ago?  The one I worked hard to conceal until after the worst was over, because I was afraid of being bullied for having too many medical conditions?  Where every single health condition I had took a nosedive, I ended up bedridden, and needing a power chair, and all kinds of changes took place?  We now think that was the time that the adrenal insufficiency became serious.  It may have been around for quite some time after that.  And if we hadn’t treated it, my expectation that I wouldn’t live to see forty, may well have been accurate.

On dexamethasone, I improved rapidly.

Prior to dexamethasone, I could not jump even when holding onto a grab rail.  On dexamethasone, I could do jumping jacks.  First five, then ten, then twenty, then forty.  Before, I couldn’t walk up one flight of stairs.  Now I can walk up and down eleven.  I’m walking everywhere with a cane now, and barely even needing to use the manual wheelchair I bought (thinking that it was more realistic that I’d need a manual wheelchair than that I’d start walking everywhere — I still do need it sometimes, but not that often). I can do 400 meters on a treadmill, I am starting to be able to run (my legs wouldn’t even move that way before) and skip and balance on one foot, and all kinds of other things I thought I’d lost forever.  I’m going on walks in my neighborhood.

Perhaps most amazing is the way I feel after exercising.  In my entire adult life, I have never felt this way:  When I exercise, I feel invigorated afterwards.  I feel more energetic after exercising than before.  This is entirely different than before, when even minor exercise made me throw up, collapse, or both, and could leave me sick and with my body temperature running high and low for weeks.

And this is amazing and magical and wonderful.

But every time I try to talk about this with a nondisabled person, or even with many disabled people, I run into a very ableist way of thinking about this:  The miracle cure story.

It runs sort of like this:  A disabled person has been hanging in the balance between cure and death (because what other possibilities are there for a disabled life?).  Hope means finding a cure, despair means not finding a cure.  They do find a cure and everyone rejoices and everything goes back to how it should’ve been (with them not disabled, of course) and things are great from there on out.

So I run into a lot of people suggesting to me that I’ve “found hope” (I haven’t).  Or that I’m “cured” (I’m not).

Here’s the reality:

I will be on steroids for the rest of my life, according to my doctors.  If I don’t take them, everything goes back to how it was and I would eventually die.

I have to keep injectable steroids around, because it’s that important that I get them every single day, even if I have a stomach bug or a clogged feeding tube.  I don’t have any other meds where it’s so important that the doctor has insisted on injectables.  Even meds that are dangerous to go off quickly.

Any time that I become stressed out or sick, my symptoms come back and I have to take more steroids.  This puts me at higher risk when sick, hospitalized, injured, or severely stressed out.  To give an example, when I found out my mom had been in the ICU, I went from feeling great, to too weak to breathe easily, in a matter of seconds.  And when I run down my stress hormones like that, I don’t make new ones, so I have to put them back artificially, it’s called ‘stress dosing’.

I have to be constantly aware of my body and of my stress levels and other factors that affect how much steroids to take.  And I have to largely play it by ear.  There is no blood test to tell you if you’re on enough steroids or not.  You have to learn that yourself.

I’m still autistic.  I still have a variety of other conditions, although some of them are much less severe now that I’m on steroids.  I still need a feeding tube.  I still need to communicate by typing.  I still need a wheelchair sometimes.  I still have stamina problems, just not as severe as before.   I still have severe chronic pain, which is getting worse as I try to train my body to move around instead of lying propped up in bed all the time.  I still have autonomic dysfunction.  I still have hypermobility syndrome.  I still have gastroparesis and bronchiectasis and the hellish interactions between them.

And even though it’s under control, I still have severe adrenal insufficiency.  Having something controlled by medication is great, but it’s not a cure.  A cure would mean I wouldn’t need to take medication, wouldn’t need to watch my stress levels and illnesses very carefully, wouldn’t need to be constantly alert to changes in my body.

This is wonderful, but an inspirational fairytale ending it ain’t.

Feeding tubes and weird ideas

My favorie BADD post: Tube-ageddon.

I haven't had much time to write anything here about the hell I went through getting my GJ tube. I had every indication for a GJ tube. I had gastroparesis so bad it was starting to affect my breathing, in a way that doctors said was likely to result in infection after infection until I died. From the emergency room onward, doctors were saying my best hope was to get a feeding tube.

Yet the pressure I got from doctors, while in the hospital for one of those infections, was to just keep getting infections, go home, wait to die. Most of them wouldn't say that outright. But some of them did. Some of them we confronted and they absolutely agreed that the only alternative to the tube was death — which could have happened to me by now, without the tube. But they still insisted on telling me not to get the tube, basically that I was better off dead than with a tube. We had to rally a bunch of people on the Internet to call the hospital before they suddenly changed their tune. My pulmonologist told me she could tell exactly when I started getting people calling the hospital, because the tone in my charts changed instantly to “let's get her the tube after all”.

Most people think of all feeding tubes as the same, all reasons for getting them as the same, and so they believe in false generalizations about their capacity to prevent lung infections, or indeed cause them. But they aren't all the same. They're all different, and the reasons for getting them are all different.

I have gastroparesis. That means my stomach is partially paralyzed. In my case it became severe before it was diagnosed last year and confirmed with testing this year. It's probably due to neuromuscular problems inherited from my mother, who has autonomic neuropathy among other things, a common cause of gastroparesis. My symptoms are similar to hers so doctors are assuming whatever we have is related. Anyway, it makes food remain in the stomach a long time. After awhile, this means that you can't eat very much and you drop a lot of weight. (I may still be fat, but they tell me by the end I was burning muscle.) by the end I was having trouble keeping down two small cartons of Boost a day, which isn't enough calories to live on. I was already on a liquid diet so there was no less food I could keep eating.

It also meant that the stuff staying in my stomach was riding up my esophagus again on gas bubbles formed by food sitting in my stomach for ages. I could feel it happening several times a day. I'd belch and food or bile would ride up with it. If this happened overnight, my bipap machine would shove the stomach contents down into my lungs from my esophagus. This began happening several times a week, and from January until March I had about five lung infections requiring antibiotics. I never stopped taking antibiotics, by the time one course was over I'd be on the next. Which is dangerous in its own right.

So when I showed up in the ER a few days after a CT scan showing what they called a “ground glass appearance”, they had no problem admitting me into the hospital, and even in the emergency room they were telling me if I wanted to live I needed a GJ tube. This wasn't news to me. They had been talking about a feeding tube since last fall, when one more nausea med added to the five they'd started me on, made me able to go home without one instead. I'd been discussing with my friends what kind of feeding tube served my needs best as a person with gastroparesis. And the GJ tube had always seemed like the best option.

A GJ tube is like a combination of a G tube and a J tube. Half of it goes into the stomach, which is a G tube. The other part goes into the first part of the small intestines, which is the J tube. The G tube gives you the ability to drain your stomach contents out into a cup, and dump them down the toilet. This means that if you do it often enough, you won't have anything building up in there and going up into your lungs. Right now, even bile and stomach acid can build up to dangerous amounts because of my stomach not emptying often enough, so I take acid reducers and I drain my G tube several times a day.

The J tube portion is the part that stuff comes in through. I eat through it. I drink through it. I get all of my medications through it. This means that nothing has to come in through my stomach. Which means we are bypassing the worst part of my digestive system. Not that the rest of my digestive system is wonderful. My esophagus is slow, my stomach is slow, and my bowels have been producing blockages since I was a teenager. But with liquid food going into my small intestine at a fairly slow rate (one feeding in roughly twenty four hours, I wasn't able to handle the twelve hour version without getting very sick) I seem to be able to handle things much better than when it was going in my stomach. I love it. It's so much easier than feeling horribly sick all the time.

I still take nausea meds, but half of them have been changed to PRN instead of daily. So daily I take Phenergan, Reglan (which speeds up my digestive system), and Marinol. And I can also take Benadryl. Lorazepam, and Zofran as needed. I used to have to take all six of those things every day, so this has really cut back on the amount of medication I need, which is good because every single one of these meds is severely sedating and it was badly affecting my ability to think straight. If I were still trying to eat, I would be taking every single one of those nausea meds at the maximum dose, and still wouldn't be able to eat enough to maintain my weight.

[Photo of me holding my tube. The J tube section is visible, the G tube is hidden behind my hand, and there's a little cloth thing from Trendie Tubies around the base, with owls on it.]

But I had to fight for this tube. Even though it was the only way to save my life. I had to fight against people who were certain I was better off dead. And I needed the help of a lot of people on the Internet, to do it. When I did get the tube, it was done without a working anesthetic. And even though the local anesthesia didn't work on me, even though I was yelling and screaming, they didn't stop to give me more, they just kept telling me that the Versed meant I wouldn't remember it later. Yeah right. It seemed like the entire process of getting the tube was one giant clusterfuck after another, and like people were making it as hard for me as they possibly could. (Later, when I had to get the tube replaced, we discovered that Propofol is the med, in combination with others, that really does the trick to keep me unaware of what's happening.) They treated me like a child, repeatedly expressing the fear that I would pull the tube out like young children often do, and blaming me when part of the tube got lodged inside me, probably as a result of over zealous physical therapy early on that was a clusterfuck in its own right.

But I got the tube and I couldn't be happier with it. I feel happier and healthier. After aspirating reflux several times a week for months, I haven't aspirated a single time in the month or so I've had the tube. My nausea is well controlled. My brain and body work better. Despite a couple complications since then, it's still the best thing medically that's happened to me in the past year. And I'm still alive, which even by now I might not have been if I kept getting infection after infection.

[The x ray showing the tube inside my body.]

Why did I have to fight so hard for it? I see two major reasons. One is that I'm perceived by medical professionals as someone whose life doesn't matter much, doesn't have much quality of life. I'm autistic, they read me as severely cognitively impaired, I am in bed all the time, they don't see that I enjoy living as much as anyone else does, and they make that decision somewhere in their heads without even noticing.

The other reason is the way medical professionals see feeding tubes. I've been trying to read the writing of nurses and doctors to find out their views on these things. Not just the horrible ones. The ones who snark at patients on their blogs. But the ones who think they're compassionate and sympathetic and good at their jobs. But in one area that makes no difference:

They all think of feeding tubes as the beginning of the end. They see getting a feeding tube as the first sign that your life as over. Possibly that you belong in a nursing home, as if anyone does. When I made out my living will, the first question of “Where do you draw the line where you want to stop living?” was whether I wanted to live if it meant I needed a feeding tube. They see people with feeding tubes as the first stop on the route to a living death. Other things they see that way are using a ventilator, having a trach, needing any sort of similar mechanical assistance to survive.

My friends see it a different way. They see me as some cool kind of cyborg, with the oxygen, the feeding tube, and the Interstim implant that prevents spasticity in my urethra, allowing me to urinate. They say the sounds my oxygen concentrator makes sound almost steampunk. But then all my friends are disabled, they see adaptive equipment as cool, and as a means to living, not a sign you're dying.

Medical professionals have been shown time and time again, to rate disabled people's quality of life lower than we rate our own quality of life. And yet time and time again, they see themselves as the experts on what our real quality of life is. One reason I try to keep my lungs and my guts in good condition is that as a person who is autistic and physically disabled, I know that if I ever got bad enough to need a transplant, I'd probably die. Because they would take one look at how I sound on paper, and they would decide my life wasn't as worth living as that of a twenty year old who wasn't disabled except for the effects of their lung problems or digestive problems. (Lung transplant is the end of the line for severe bronchiectasis. My bronchiectasis is mild, I'm working hard at keeping it that way. Transplant is also the end of the line for very severe gastroparesis combined with other gut problems. I'm hoping I don't get to that point despite severe gastroparesis. Given how hard it was just to get a feeding tube, which is the standard treatment when you start aspirating this much and being unable to eat even a liquid diet, I don't know that I stand a chance at making the transplant list should I need one.)

I also had trouble getting home. People were asking me if I belonged in a nursing home, or at least in twenty four hour care. I'm not sure why. It's not like it's hard to care for a GJ tube. It's unusual, but it's certainly easier than my old med regimen, which was truly difficult and time consuming. Now we just mix them up, put them in a syringe, and stick them straight into the tube. Easy. Eating is easier too, no more worrying I will throw up, and you only need to set up the food once a day and press a button on a feeding pump. But everyone has this illusion that it's incredibly difficult, and the VNA loves to take people with tubes and stick us in nursing homes claiming they can no longer care for us on the outside.

[The feeding pump on an IV pole with the food (Osmolite, low fat, high protein, no fiber) hanging above it.]

I still don't understand what the big deal is supposed to be. By the time you get a feeding tube, eating is really hard. Either you're having swallowing problems, or something is wrong with your stomach. In my case, my stomach was emptying so slowly that I was constantly severely nauseated no matter how little I ate, I was dropping weight way too fast, and I was aspirating reflux caused by all the food sitting around for ages. I was quite possibly going to die from repeated infections. How the hell is a feeding tube supposed to be worse than that?

I can't even begin to comprehend the fear of these things. I mean I literally can't do it. It makes no sense. It's all based in prejudice. It has nothing to do with the reality of a feeding tube.

I thought the worst part would be not being able to eat. The most I can do is drink a tiny bit of ginger ale, and I have to be very careful even with that. But I don't miss food. The feeding tube ensures that I am never hungry, and always have the nutrients I need. The only times I have ever started craving food, were two separate days where I spent all day at the emergency room unable to use my tube. Each time I came home and wanted to eat or drink something I didn't normally want to eat or drink. But when I'm getting food regularly, it's not a problem. I barely miss eating at all. I never even think about it. Even the vivid dreams I'd been having about all different kinds of food, all those months on Ensure, have gone away. My body seems perfectly satisfied with what it's getting, and it doesn't crave things unless I can't use the tube.

And it makes everything easier. Food is easier. Medication is easier. Absolutely nothing is any harder than normal. It's more like dealing with something easy and mechanical, than dealing with anything hard. We did learn the hard way to flush it with coke after every medication, because by the time there was a clog, you couldn't get enough coke in to dissolve it. So we are dissolving the clogs before they can even form, by leaving coke in for awhile after every single time we use meds. I've also discovered it's possible to reduce the pressure inside me — which can prevent the meds and water from flowing into me as easily — by relaxing my body, especially my rectum, and then everything usually flows in pretty easily. So there are a few tricks, but it has overall been much easier than my life was before I got the tube.

So what is so scary? I don't know. I can't find anything at all scary about this. It doesn't mean anything horrible. It means I'm alive. Being alive is a good thing. I don't fear death, but I only get one chance at life, and I don't want to die just because someone else has decided my life isn't worth enough to them. And so I'm very much interested in anything that will keep me alive longer, whether it's a feeding tube or any other “scary” device used for keeping disabled people around longer than used to be possible.

A lot of people I know have those devices, the ones that medical professionals think your life is over. Feeding tubes. Trachs. Ventilators. Catheters. Ostomies. Central lines. All those things that seem to scare people to death, even though there's nothing scary about them. They prolong life, not end it. And I'm furious at every single doctor who urged me to go home and die rather than get this feeding tube and get a chance to live longer. That is simply not their decision to make, and they were bound and determined to make it for me until I got enough people on my side to convince them that the entire world was watching the crap they were trying to pull.

I am going to work as hard as I can, to change hospital policy so that nobody gets pressured in the way I did. It's incredibly difficult to deal with pressure to die, when you're already sick and exhausted and have no energy to fight back. And they do it in sneaky ways, so that if I had been delirious or something, which I often am in the hospital, I might not have recognized what they were trying to do. My experiences are far from unusual, many disabled people have been encouraged to die rather than get a feeding tube, or a vent, or something else that would allow us to live. My mother, who has many of the same conditions I do, is going through a mess where doctor after doctor refuses to treat her or perform surgery on her, and she keeps having to go back to the Mayo clinic because they're the only ones who seem to be committed to making sure she can live as long as possible. And as a disabled senior citizen way below the poverty line, she gets the “your life isn't worth it to us” thing from at least three different angles. This stuff isn't unique to my life, the pressure to die is everywhere.

But most disabled people, like most people in general, prefer to be alive. Being disabled rarely changes that fact, not on its own. And the fact that anyone thinks we ought not to, that their pity goes so far as to be a death wish aimed at another person, is so disgusting I don't even have words for it. But they are the ones who are disgusted at my advance directive, which tells them to keep me alive no matter what. I can hear it in the sound of their voice when they ask me about advance directives. Advance directives are supposed to be about making your own choices, but the choice to live is the least respected among them. They would rather I not be here by now, rather I got my sixth, seventh, eighth infection until my lungs finally gave out. I refuse to give them the satisfaction. I love being alive and a tube doesn't change that one bit, in fact it makes my life better.

 

Posted with Blogsy

My pneumonia got much worse and I’m in the process of being admitted to the hospital.

I’m exhausted past the point I knew exhaustion even existed. I’m glad my friends pushed me into this. Both of them were extremely freaked out after finally seeing me.