Good god, y'all. It's such an amazing feeling when a great mystery of life is answered. It doesn't always calm, but it definitely brings a sense of relief. I've known that I had a problem with overheating too easily for a very long time. I'm pretty sure I told the story early in this blog of our first move to North Carolina, twenty-one years ago, when we were poor little church mice who couldn't afford an extra day on the rental truck. We had to un-ass all of our belongings into the garage of the house we just leased, before any of the utilities were turned on. We had no air conditioning and no water, and it was July in Fayetteville, NC. The heat index was 104, and I can only guess what the sultry relative humidity was that day. Our children were four and five years old, so they were no help. The only liquid we had was half of a 3 liter bottle of warm, flat Sprite. I remember collapsing on the kitchen floor, somewhere before we completed the task of unloading and turning the truck in at 5 pm. My husband was dripping sweat. I was bone dry, dizzy, and sure I was going to barf. I have been conscious since then that I never sweat. I think a couple times I had a single bead of moisture run down the back of my calf during the worst of the South Carolina summers recently, and I accomplished a little of that sexy boob sweat at the gym a few times, but really, that's it. I've often gone up to my husband in the last several years, when we were laboring outside, and forcefully said, "Look at me! Touch me! Here, touch under my arm! There is no sweat whatsoever. It HURTS!" I've always had concerned citizens come up to me in gyms or bowling alleys or anywhere that gets vaguely warm and ask me whether I'm okay. My face turns fuschia pink, and I get loopy. I do this in crowds, I do this at home. I can't control my temperature, and it makes me cranky.
I've complained to a few doctors about it along the way. I have to be honest, I always thought it was a thyroid-related complication, but I didn't really find literature to support that fully. Tonight, I was poking around on the Molly's Fund site, looking at a blog dealing with peripheral neuropathy, as it relates to lupus (and my unbearable chronic foot pain). And there it was, about halfway down the page: autonomic nerve damage symptoms. It listed so many of my problems--problems with heart rate (I have known of bradycardia for 8 years now), difficulty regulating blood pressure that leads to dizziness and light-headedness (yep, usually upon standing but not always), problems with digestion (oh, I could give you TMI here, but I won't), loss of bladder control (thankfully not so much on this one!!), INABILITY TO SWEAT NORMALLY which could lead to heat intolerance (21 years I waited for this answer!!), and difficulty eating or swallowing (the last-straw symptom that led me to ask my doc whether I had Hashimoto's thyroiditis, which caused the discovery of the lupus after all these years).
I've complained endlessly here and in real life about how long I have to wait for my first rheumatology appointment. But maybe it's not so bad after all, in that I'm taking the time to do a lot of research going in, and learning all of the symptoms I need to mention to my new doc, including all the little weird ones that I would not have thought to associate with this without prompting. There are so many things that go wrong with me, and when I ask other people if they have them, the answer I almost always get is, "No, Anne, just you." I'm finally starting to understand why, and I'm finally starting to gather up all the little pieces of things I thought I just had to live with and ignore. Turns out, ignoring them would not have been a good idea.
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