Yoga vs Me

Oh man, I made the mistake of going to a yoga class with my mother last night. Cue me sleeping in to 1:00pm today and waking up so stiff and painful that I can hardly move. Arthritis and yoga do not mix. I snap, crackled, and popped through as many of the poses as I could but downward dog is just not my friend. Not to mention lung and connective tissue problems makes it really hard to breath during said stretches. Let's not even start on attempting to balance.
It was an experience for sure.

Next time, I will bring a chair so that I can modify the poses to be easier for me to handle.
If you would like to try it, here is a link to a lady who specializes in yoga for arthritis and she has instructional videos on youtube!
https://www.youtube.com/user/KimMcNeilYoga



PS sorry for the sporadic updates.

A Letter

Dear Mitt Romney,

In your quest to obtain the presidential election bid this year you have said some things that have made people feel you are out of touch with the everyday struggles of all but a small number of upper class citizens. I have largely agreed with these criticisms, but it wasn't until I thought about one specific thing you said that I really stood up and took offense.

You said something to the effect of 'if you need money you should go ask your parents for help'

Now, I'm sure you can spin this however you want, and that you intended it to mean money to help start a business, but when I applied the basic principle of asking my parents for money for help to my own situation I realized you have pretty much told me that my life is not valuable enough for my government to help keep me from dying.

You see, while I was busy working to pay my way though college, or at least to pay for what wasn't covered by a near full ride scholarship and student loans, working away to better myself and open avenues for a good future where I could be a success I was dying. I don't mean in the spiritual. starving my soul kind of dying because I was working towards a goal where I would be helping others for a living and that's where I feel success lies. No, I was fighting a war against myself, my own immune system was and still is waging an attack on every blood vessel in my body, from the large arteries to the small capillaries.

This is something you should be able to sympathize with as I understand your wife also suffers from an autoimmune disorder.

Completely unaware of what was going on inside me, I graduated college and began work teaching under privileged kids at a Title I public school.

Within a few months of working I was near dead.

I had attributed my symptoms first, to being at college, and environment where many people are not able to go to the doctors and germs are spread readily. Then I convinced myself that I was sick because I was teaching young children. By December my lungs were hemorrhaging, I could hardly walk, and the only reason my kidneys were not considered to be in failure was because the waste being dumped into my system had not yet appeared in my blood work, which came as a shock to my doctors.

This is how, at the age of 24, I was diagnosed with the rare disease Granulomatosis with Polyangiits formerly know as Wegener's Granulomatosis. A relative of Lupus, MS, asthma, Chrones Disease, and a mirade of other autoimmune disorders.

I managed to finish out the school year taking highly toxic medications everyday, but was, regrettably, not healthy enough to return after summer break. I was lucky in that I had been living with my parents while I saved money to find my own place and they continued to allow me to live under their roof while I spent all of my savings on monthly doctors visits, prescriptions, ER visits, and surgeries.

This was all while I was still on my parents' insurance.

Here is where I get to my reasoning that you have told me I should resign myself to die.

I will run out of insurance in the next few months. I was very lucky that President Obama's health care reform at least was able to let me stay insured until I was 26 years old. You know, the health care reform that was based on the model you created for Massachusetts; the one that would have given me a low cost government insurance option that I could afford had you not helped to block it?

At 26, in November, actually, the same month I will not be voting for you, I will become uninsured on top of being unemployed. I have tried Social Security but, funny thing, they say I am too young and too highly educated to be disabled so I have to wait another 12-16 months so that I may plead my case in front of a judge.

Until then, I get to figure out how to come up with $11,000 a year to pay for my life. This figure is only an estimate and does not include any surgeries, ER visits, antibiotics, hospital stays, x-rays, scans, and labwork that often tag every year for someone who is immunocompromised, is taking highly toxic medications daily, and has a mirade of other complications stemming from such.

My parents are currently helping me, they cannot afford to help me cover this sum, either. Unless you are willing to chip in and help Mr. Romney by coming up with better programs or become willing to put your money where your mouth is, I am stuck between a rock and a wall of knives. Left untreated, my disease has a life expectancy of five months or less once symptoms start showing. In this case, death is a painful process of going through multiple organ failures at the same time.

This is a reality that many, many citizens of the United States are facing right now.

Your thoughtless words lead me to believe that you are not just ignorant of the struggles faced by most Americans, you are dangerously out of touch. I need a leader who realizes very few people have the luxury of turning to a vast family fortune when money is needed. I need a leader who knows that, for most of us, one paycheck is standing between having a home and being put out on the street. One missed paycheck is all it would take to destroy a family and send people to their graves.

You are not that leader.

My life is not a privilege, it is a right and who are you to determine my worthiness based upon my family fortunes?

That's an Interesting Reaction

So, I already went over the part about how I decided to err on the side of going to regret this later and take the advice of InstaCare. I really should not have.


I took the pills and, if anything, my fever got higher! I also developed this nasty side effect of having my tongue swell up, it wasn't terrible, I could still breath. But talking became a problem. It made calling in to work an interesting experience; the poor cell phone reception plus me tawkink dlie I hadth a mouf thfull ofb oadbeel was probably an interesting conversation to listen to. On the other hand, I didn't have to say much in order to get excused.

Did I mention that I am allergic to augmentin?

So, I trundle off to bed for the night thinking to myself, well, it's just the flu. I should be better by tomorrow.

Then came 3 o clock in the morning. Why is it that everything terrible seems to happen at 3 in the morning? I remember what time it was because, like any young adult growing up in the technology age who is awoken during the pre-dawn hours by coughing up mouthfuls of blood I turned to my internet capable phone to look up and see what could be wrong with me.

Now, when I say mouthfuls, I mean "looks-like-a-movie-set-where-someone-got-shot-in-the-gut" MOUTHFULS, it sounds disgusting but the stuff was leaking out of my mouth even when I wasn't coughing. The silly thing was, as terrified as I was, I didn't go wake any of the other FOUR people in my house because I didn't want to worry them.

I have to say, that these were probably the actions that got me moved from my basement room into the guest room across from my parents.

So, I sit, and I wait. I don't really want to go back to sleep fearing that I might not wake up. But, according to the InstaCare my lungs look fine. I have nothing to worry about. It's just the flu. Some deadly, deadly flu, maybe. Have some antibiotics!

Finally, I hear other people awake and moving around as they get ready to go to work. This is when I force myself to stumble up the stairs and find out a really interesting fact: if you're coughing up blood and it has already been established that you're not breathing 100% physical and emotional stress are things you should avoid.

I make it to the kitchen table and even though I am gasping like a fish I'm not getting any air. Between the blood and my cough I had no space for air to travel. Luckily, I have a mother who knows how to deal with such situations!

She quickly got me a small glass of Sprite in order to clear my throat. Hallelujah! It worked! Thank you Mommy! You saved me!

Also, I decided that I should go see my real doctor.