Some of you will know that Melissa used to post on my blog. For those of you who don’t know Melissa passed away last night after they took her off of life support. I am sad that she is no long with us but I am so glad that I have some of her writing that I can look back on a remember her by. She was a great person and I looked at her more as a mother figure than as a friend. This post is a post she wrote about me on 10/1/2010. I am re-posting it because what she said to me is how I feel about her. I am going to take the next few days off of writing but I am going to re-post some the posts she wrote for my blog. I am also going to be writing a post about her and that should be up in the next few weeks. If you have any memories that I can include if you would please leave them that would be great.
Written by Melissa Mashburn of Sugar Filled Emotions
Most of the time when I write, my primary goal is to write about something that I find inspiring. Once I put it all down, I can only hope that my readers find it as inspiring as I do. Today’s post is really no different, except instead of writing about a topic or idea that I find inspiring, I am going to say a few things about a person I find inspiring.
You inspire me because not only do you have to live with all the normal day to day struggles that we all have, you also have some unique physical challenges that you could use justify a life of inactivity. Instead you do the opposite. You make no excuses. You do what you can, which is often more than what someone with a healthy body would/could do.
You are one of the kindest people I know. No matter how you feel, you have a kind word for me.
You are a shining example of strength in the face of difficulties. I admire your courage.
You have such a giving spirit. You are quick to make sure the people around you are doing okay.
You are a beautiful person, inside and out!
for being my friend. Thank you for letting me be a part of your life! Thank you for allowing me to post on your blog.
It has been a few weeks since I have written a post about my fight trying to get over NES. I haven’t been doing well at all with it. I haven’t really been trying to hard because I am trying to get through the withdrawals symptoms that I am having since I have stopped Lexapro and started taking Zoloft. I didn’t really keep track of the days that I didn’t eat but I did really bad last night. I have been struggling with a few things lately and I think that is why I have been struggling with eating at night. I am really struggling with being single right now. I have really started to miss a few guys from my past but I know that they are there for a reason.
All I all it has been a rough few weeks but I am going to start working hard on it again and I hope that I will do better this week.
This last weekend was super tough for me. I am switching antidepressants because of my eating disorder and things are not going well at all. I had my infusion on Friday and I really think it messed with me bad. I literally slept all day Saturday so I didn’t take any of my pills. Then on Sunday I didn’t take them because I didn’t want to get sick. Let me tell you never again will I miss any days of taking my antidepressants. Now to top off the missing two days I am starting the new one. I am a total mess. I hate messing with antidepressants it is so stressful and not to mention emotional. I am sit and think today of everything and have to wonder how I have made it this far in life. I have gone through some major stuff and yet “most” days I am able to keep going and not think about all my past issues. Although the past few days though I find that I am barely hanging on by a thread. I find it hard to deal with all of my past issues right now. I know when I am evened out on my antidepressants that I am okay and I can deal with the day-to-day things going on. I sit at work with my personal life in chaos and can’t even get away because work is a joke right now. I never before have seen when it rains it pours come anymore true than right now.
I was getting to leave work yesterday and I broke down crying because I remembered like it was yesterday all the emotions and feelings I had when I placed my daughter for adoption almost 6 years ago. I sit here and I can remember all the feelings I felt when I saw her for the first time. She was about 12 hours old before I even saw and held her. When I went into the hospital I didn’t want to ever see her. Before I had her I felt that it would be easier for me if I never saw her or held her. I had called my night nurse for a pain pill. When the nurse came in with the pain pill she told me that it was time to feed my daughter and asked me if I would like to feed her. As I was sitting there in the middle of the night I knew it was something I needed to do. After the nurse brought her in and left the room I remember looking at my daughter and crying because I knew if a few short days I was going to place her with her family. I remember feeling so happy that she was here and perfect but so sad knowing that every minute that went by was one less minute I was going to have her with me. Then as I thought about it more all the feelings that I had when I was signing away my rights to her came back as well. I can remember sitting there with my social worker and two nurses with the pen in my hand and the paper in front of me thinking that if I didn’t hurry and sign the papers I never was going to be able to do it. I remember when I was down the great weight I felt on my shoulders and still have that weight today. I hoped then and still do hope that I did what was best for her. I pray every day that I truly did what God wanted me to do. I remember sitting there after I signed holding her and knowing that the time to say goodbye was there. We were all talking and I got quiet and started to tear up. I knew in my heart that it was time to hand her over to her family and walk away. I remember getting up and handing her off to her adoptive dad and then turning around and breaking down because of what was going on. I vaguely remember the adoptive mom asking if she could give me a hug and me saying no. At that point I watched as they walked out of the room with her. I then got in a wheel chair and left the hospital empty handed and broken hearted.
It is hard to be at work and feel all of that like it was happening yesterday. It is hard for me to feel all these emotions and know that they will pass soon but not sure how long I can hold out for that time to come. This post is just a lot of rambling but I hope it helps me because now it is out. There is more that I am feeling but I don’t have the emotional capacity to write about it now. I hope that everyone has had a better weekend than me. As for the NES update and an MS post I will hopefully pick those up again next week!
This post has been harder for me to write than when I posted Brita’s story. I began to get sick when I was in 10th grade. The first really symptom that I can remember is my left leg started to drag. It would just stop working at random times. I can remember in gym class that year we had to run the mile for a grade and I did my best but I was going to fail the class because I could run it fast enough because my leg was dragging. We went to the doctors and lets just say the only reason they did an MRI was because my grandma pushed for it. When that came back they called us in because they needed to talk to us. They said that there was what they call lesions on the brain. They show up as white spots on the brain. They told us that they needed to do a spinal tap to rule out MS.
The spinal tap in and of it self was a huge ordeal to say the least. I got the spinal tap on a Thursday and by Saturday I was so sick. I had a huge headache and was throwing up. So we went to the ER because it was obvious that my spinal tap hadn’t sealed. When we got the ER they made me lay in the waiting for about an hour until they took me back to a room. After they knew what was going on they wanted to send me home because the guy that could fix it was on call and he didn’t want to come and do a blood patch. He finally came in after my grandparents raised a living hell because I could have died if I didn’t get a blood patch ASAP.
When the results of the spinal tap came back they called us in again and told my and my grandparents and I had Multiple Sclerosis. They wanted to start me right away on Avonex. I don’t really remember much of the next couple of months. I think I was still numb to the whole situation. What I do remember is how sick the medication made me every weekend. I took the shot on Friday nights and spent the whole weekend with flu like symptoms. I stopped taking that medication after awhile and started on Copaxone. With that one I had to take a shot everyday and that didn’t last very long either.
I was pretty stable and not much went on until a year ago and that is when my hand went numb and it got hard to do anything with them. Slow I have been able to use them more but it feels like they are asleep all of the time anymore. I started on Tysabri about a year ago and so far it has worked the best but I also has a major problem with it as well. You can develop a condition known as PML that will basically make you a vegetable. They are finding out that the longer you are on the drug the higher your chances are of getting this serious condition. I am not sure how much longer I will be on this medication but I don’t have any other options right now.
That is my story in a nutshell. If you have any other question feel free to ask me I will answer any questions that you may have.
First I am going to post some helpful information before I post my story so that you will be able to follow along a little bit better.
Multiple Sclerosis is what they call an autoimmune disease. This means that the person immune system for some reason decided it is going to attack so part of the body that it shouldn’t attack. In MS the immune system decides it is going to attack the nerves of the CNS (central nervous system). They are not sure what triggers the immune system to think that part of the body is a invader and needs to be attacked.
There are a lot of different symptoms that go along with this disease. I am going to list some of the most common ones: Fatigue, problems with walking, numbness, tingling, slurred speech, tremors, stiffness, problems with vision, cognition, speech, and elimination. Every person with MS has different symptoms.
Anyone can get MS. Women are more like to get it than men and so are people with a lighter pigmentation to there skin. So Montel Williams who has MS is a real rarity. They think MS has a genetic link but they aren’t sure what it is. In my case there is no one in my family history of it. You usually get diagnosed between the ages of 20-50. I was a rarity and was diagnosed at age 16. Although younger patients are now getting diagnosed because doctors are starting to look for it at a younger ages.
MS symptoms happen when the immune system attacks the myelin around the nerves. If you think of your nerves like a wire the myelin would be the protective covering around the wire. If the nerve underneath the myelin gets hurt that is what causes the symptoms and some times permanent disabilities.
The body tries to repair the damage that is done but it is never the same the the nerve never really functions the same.
MS is rarely fatal. Most of the time people with MS with get a common cold of the flu and that is what will end up taking their lives.
There are several treatments out there that each do things differently. I am on one called Tysabri and it is the most expensive and most dangerous of the drugs. All of the current MS treatments are expensive and it makes it hard for people like me who have the disease to get the treatments that they need. There is always new treatments in the works and exciting things happening in research that hold so much hope for future generations.
There is currently no cure for MS.
That is all I can think to tell you. If you have any questions please feel free to ask them and I will answer them all in another post. I hope this will help everyone understand my story a little bit better. I am going to post my story next Thursday. So if you have any questions please ask so everything will be clear to you when I post my story.
I watched the Lifetime movie called “Pregnancy Pact” last night and it really got me thinking about teen pregnancy and about my story of getting pregnant and placing the baby for adoption. I decided that I will give you that story today since it is on my mind and I am having trouble writing my post on the MS. Don’t worry I am still working on it. It is just going to take a little longer than what I thought it was going to.
Anyway here is my story.
I was 19 and going to school up at Weber State University. I was a sophomore and going to school for nursing. I was living in the apartment style dorms and lets just say the year started out bad. I should have just moved off campus like Carrie my roommate from my freshman year. The first apartment I was in that year was with freshman and lets just say it was hard because they wanted to party and I had a really tough class that I needed to study for so after things got really bad I asked to move. In the mean time I had started to see a guy and lets just say that I didn’t wait long before I slept with him for the first time.
I moved into a new apartment with two girls that turned out to be drug addicts and one of them ended up over dosing the day before Thanksgiving but I am getting ahead of myself. After I moved in that apartment I got pregnant. I found out because I was so sick that I went to the hospital to see what was wrong with me. They ran a pregnancy test and told me I was pregnant. I already knew I was at that point but I just didn’t want to admit to it. In fact I knew the night it happened that I was.
The rest of that semester is still fuzzy to me. I can remember telling my grandma the night I got out of the hospital on the phone and she basically told me that I should place the baby. The funny thing about that is that I already knew I was going to do that I just didn’t want to admit it to anyone else for a long time. I started going to LDS Family Services because it was free and they had a support group for girls that were pregnant and not married.
After the semester ended I moved home because I couldn’t deal with the stress of school and my roommate over dosing anymore. While I was at home I was working two jobs and taking an online class. In January I started looking for profiles of couples that were looking to adopt. The first time I looked I picked out two couples and brought them home to see what my family thought. This is where the story get weird to say the least. Come to find out my grandma had talk to my social worker and asked her to pull a certain profile so that I could look at them. One of the profiles that I brought home was the family that she picked out. I didn’t know that until she told me after I delivered and everything was done.
In the mean time they did a blood test at the doctors office and they told me that the baby could possible have either down syndrome or what they call Trisomy 18. Because of that blood test I had to go up to the University of Utah and have a longer ultra sound to rule out both of those. After we got done with that the chances of it went done some and I decided that anymore testing could just wait until she was born.
After I picked them I made up a really cute basket of stuff for them and sent it to announce to them that I had picked them. Well come to find out they had a gotten a baby in March and the agency didn’t know if they could place my daughter with them as well. I told my social worker that I still really felt that is where she was supposed to go and that she needed to try everything that she could to make it work. After a few weeks of going back and forth and asking the other birth mom if it was ok with her they finally decided that she could be placed with them.
This was such a relief for me. After we got that decision we started the process of meeting with them and getting to know them. While this was all going on I was getting huge and super tired of being pregnant. I was due July 7th and it was hot and tiring be pregnant during the summer. I went in to the doctors a week before I was due and he said that if I didn’t go into labor on my own before my due date he would induce me on my due date.
Well the morning I was supposed to be induced my water broke and lets just say I knew she would come on her own time and she waited until the last possible second to do it on her own. I was in labor for about 12 hours or so. When it was time to have her I had the adoptive mom in the room so that she could see her being born. They ended up having to use the vacumn thing to get her out because she was stuck on my tail bone and I was too tired to keep pushing.
Two days after I had her I signed the papers and said my goodbyes to the baby that I named Gracelynn but they latter changed to Brita. There isn’t a day that goes by that she doesn’t pop into my head and I just wonder is she happy?? Did I do the right thing???? Will she hate me one day because of the choice I made to place her for adoption???? I hope one day I will get to meet her and get to know her but I also know that it is totally up to her and I will have to live with her decision.
This is a really long post so I will post part two of this story tomorrow and get into why I made the decision to place her and things like that. Hope everyone is having a great Monday. If you have any questions feel free to leave a comment and I will answer all of them!!!
