Update on FND, Recovery, and Hobbies

The last few months have been full of big changes.

The biggest of which is that I'm home from rehab! They discharged me at the end of October. I've settled back in and have been having therapy with home health for physical and occupational therapy. 

My husband had to do a lot of work to adapt our apartment to what I needed—taking doors off and putting up curtains so my walker would it through, making adjustments with rugs, making sure my path was clear through the apartment, and getting the food I need because, at least for a while, I can't cook. Now that it's the end of January, I'm trying to start cooking again, mostly with the slow cooker so I don't need to worry about it burning until it's been in for a lot longer than it should be. By that point, my husband will have arrived home from work.

Being home and yet so limited is difficult, to say the least. I'm used to a certain level of activity, and the fact that I can't have it is causing a fair bit of depression and anger. This isn't helped by the fact that I'm trapped in my home because I have so many falls and some of them are due to me collapsing because my body has decided to not move from the neck down. When that happens, I have no control over where and when I fall, and even if I'm on an electric cart, I'll still hit the floor. That type of fall will have me landing on my head on tile flooring. So, I've left the house four times in the last three months, mostly for doctors' appointments.

I've had two major setbacks. One put me back in the hospital in mid-December, this time for five days, where the hospitalist caring for me didn't take me seriously and diagnosed me with a muscle condition, not what I actually have. I improved quickly upon arriving home, which was great. However, for a lot of this week I have experienced a lot of loss of the improvement I made in the last three months. I spent a week and a half not needing the walker, and when I woke up Wednesday morning, I could barely walk even with the walker. It was incredibly sudden and a little frightening.

The symptoms I have are worrying, though they've improved marginally. I'm experiencing less of the confusion now, which is fantastic, but my weakness and extreme dizziness are making getting around my apartment extremely difficult. It's been rough to have such an extreme setback, though progress and recovery are never linear.

I'm in contact with my doctor, and she'll let me know what I need to do next.

My crafting has been going well, and that's exciting. I finally got my yarn stash back after needing to seal it away due to our bedbug infestation a year ago. It had finally been enough time for any bedbugs contained in my stash to have starved to death, which takes a year, so I've been slowly sorting through it and discovering what I have in there that I forgot about in the last year.

Regardless, I've had much success in crafting with what little I had to work with.

Photo Credit: Kristin Hardwick

The one thing that has been going really well for the last few months has been my writing. I'm getting close to publishing the first book in my series and am tackling research on the second book—after I wrote it unfortunately, so it will potentially need a lot of edits and rewrites of passages.

But the first book is growing closer to publishing, and I'm thrilled!