I'm tired of being vague about things

This weekend we cleaned the house, which shouldn’t have been as big a deal as it was, but it was and so I’m feeling very accomplished and proud of my kids. We swept, swiffered, vacuumed, dusted, de-cluttered and cleaned bathrooms. We also rearranged the living room, at the request of my son, into an arrangement that solves the problem of flow into the sitting area and has the happy coincidence of being easier for us to play fetch with the dog!

My physical therapy is making progress, which is good but it is also not complete which is making me impatient. Being well enough to actually do the cleaning that was necessary was progress, but I did have to watch the amount of stair-climbing I did and was sore for a couple of days afterward anyway. I’m still swimming a couple of times a week and am more limited by my availability & boredom than by my pain now. I’m getting another steroid injection in my worse knee and that will help a lot. Soon I might even be able to do weight bearing exercises!

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I’ve now passed the 2 year mark since I left my marriage, though the divorce was finalized months later. As happens with the passage of time, the edges of the pain are softening and life is looking, in many ways, better than it ever has. I’m exploring my own sense of self, wants and needs with patience in the safe space of independence. I’m enjoying dating and connecting with people on all sorts of levels, though I still miss many of my far flung friends. One of my co-workers told me months ago about her dating adventures and how she went on many dates after a big break up. I remember the story making me sad and overwhelmed, now I believe that it was actually as fun as she said it was.

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I’m trying to stay engaged in Ob/Gyn medicine while I’m on this hiatus from residency so I’m not completely rusty when I go back. I’m finding as many excuses as I can to read practice bulletins and even reading the main academic journal we have (the one we get paper copies of as residents). I have issues and issues stacked up, unexplored. I decided to start with 2019 and read some of them. I’m also continuing to think about surgery, imagining the steps and the sensations of the common procedures I do - cesareans, hysterectomies, etc. I want to spend some time with the laparoscopic trainer in the sim lab but it is going to have to wait until my duties at home are a little less time consuming. I’m hoping that after spring break I’ll be able to work a regular in-office schedule instead of having to work from home sometimes. Everyone needs to get used to me having obligations outside of parenting so we can ease back into residency.

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I have this chronic health condition that I have alluded to here but not spelled out. I have something called endolymph hydrops in my left ear. The medical eponym is Meniere’s disease, which is a term I hate. In part because it is more of a syndrome than a disease and in part because I hate eponyms.

I started having symptoms in the 2nd year of med school, whether it was just onset of the hydrops or if I had an infection in the ear after which the consequence was hydrops, we’ll never know. I believe it was the latter. The most limiting symptom of this condition is episodes of debilitating vertigo. Fortunately I have had very few of these and not for nearly three years. However, it does also have symptoms of progressive but waxing & waning hearing loss and tinnitus. Also the process of losing hearing is not painless, at least for me. It is accompanied by pain and fullness in my inner ear that causes headaches and fatigue.

I’ve got some triggers that I avoid or manage to reduce symptoms and I’ve recently learned that I clench my jaw a lot and have TMJ pain as well that is causing some of my symptoms and is not related to the hydrops. A bite guard helps so I’m splurging for a custom one so I can sleep a little easier. The cheap one I have now is already helping. I take a low dose diuretic that has absolutely no data to support it (Never seen such an empty review from the Cochrane database!). Some doctors tell me it will help the fullness, others say it is really only for the vertigo. So I may not need to take it but I think it helps so I am going to keep taking it. I’m limited in dose by my very low blood pressure so this is as much effect as I’m going to get.

There are also times that the tinnitus & hearing just get worse and I don’t know why. Right now is one of those times. It may get better again, but it is pretty bad right now. I have profound hearing loss in low frequencies and mild hearing loss in higher (conversational) frequencies. I have a REALLY hard time localizing sound right now (recently thought my kids were in the bathroom together, which they would never do!) My new ear doctor says that I definitely qualify for a hearing aid at this point. Whether or not I can tolerate one will be another question. Hearing loss sometimes causes paradoxical noise sensitivity and I’ve got that. Also insurance doesn’t cover hearing aids or accompanying visits at all.

Right now I have this low steady tinnitus that is constant, but better than it has been the last few days (bite guard!). There have been moments this week where the tinnitus is so distracting, I have trouble thinking, I talk loudly, or I just have to go to my room and put glycerine drops in my ear and lay down (the drops put pressure against my eardrum and into my cochlea, they are soothing). Interestingly, I have another tone of tinnitus that comes when certain muscles in my back & neck are tensed. In a quiet room, I can tell when that tone is present and if I relax the muscles, it goes right away. I’m regularly wowed by this little experiment on my 8th cranial nerve.

The changes to my reality with this syndrome now include that I don’t drink alcohol (I already didn’t drink caffeine but that would have been another change to make), I endeavor to eat a low sodium diet (I fail miserably often), I have an earplug that I can use if I want to be social someplace loud (any bar, restaurant or public gathering place, even movies sometimes), and sometimes I can’t bear to be in any of those places at all. I can’t go see live music without days of repercussions so it has to be good to make it worth it. Even during this leave of absence when I’m able to think about my food more and get enough sleep (obviously fatigue is also a trigger), I’m still very tense and stressed (I want to go back to work, but the timing of that is very much out of my control, not something I cope well with). Couple all that with a rising pollen count (nothing like living in Oregon at least), and I’ve been pretty symptomatic recently.

This too shall pass.