Some people have witnessed how my mysterious illness has affected balance and the way I walk; it’s really a sight to see. The only way that I can describe the way that I walk is that it alternates between a granny shuffle and a Chinese military march. One second I’ll be shuffling along and then the next thing you know my left leg will suddenly hike itself up into the air and stay there a moment and then plop itself back down to the ground. Axl Rose and his crazy crab walk across the stage has NOTHING over the kind of walking that I do! I would challenge him to a catwalk any day and I would TOTALLY win! But I don’t think that I would want to battle him on the catwalk because he might beat me up afterward! YIKES!
The balance issue, for me, is a lot scarier because it kind of comes and goes and the severity of it is hit-and-miss. One moment I can have my balance completely under control and the next thing you know…TIMBER! And we all know how big I am, so if you see me falling, you had better move or you’ll end up squashed like a bug on the floor! Just this morning, and lucky enough for me it was 6am so Mom was already up, I got up to use the facilities and didn’t use my cane. I left the door cracked open, just in case anything should go awry. I managed all right until I was on my way out the door. When I flipped off the switch to the bathroom, I totally lost all sense of where I was, so I had to call for my mother and she had to come and get me and put me back to bed. Simply switching off the light in the bathroom messed up my balance AND it messed up my ability to walk because I walked like a Chinese soldier all the way (7 whole feet) to my bedroom.
I now get asked frequently if I’ve had a stroke or an aneurysm by perfect strangers, so my symptoms of my mystery illness are becoming more apparent. My speech, at times, gets slurred or I stutter/stumble over my words or cannot formulate a cohesive sentence which is very frustrating for me; but it’s noticeable to people who don’t even know me, so that’s not a good sign. But I’m still plugging along. Like I tell people all the time: I truly am sicker than I come off, it’s just a façade that I am putting up so that I don’t bring people down that are around me.
As an aside: the reason I haven’t blogged in a while is because I recently got hired as a freelance writer, so I’ve been focusing a little more on that because I have a writing quota that I have to meet, but I will do my best to keep up my blogs as well. Thank you all for reading them!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment