“Do you, Mattastical Matt, take this woman, Imaginary Girlfriend, to be your lawfully wedded wife, to have and to hold, in sickness and in health, in good times and woe, for richer or poorer, keeping yourself solely unto her for as long as you both shall live?”
I do!
“And do you, imaginary girlfriend, take this man, Mattastical Matt, to be your lawfully wedded husband, to have and to hold, in sickness and health, to love…”
“Wait, sickness AND in health? Mmm, I don’t know about that. You’re not fun to take care of when you are sick. Maybe we should just call this whole thing off.”
______________________________________________________________________________
I got sick a lot when I was a little kid. For various reasons, some of which I choose not to say here. Most times it was just the common cold, but I would get sick sometimes whenever I was away from home for too long. I got home sick easily.
I do remember… throwing up a lot as a kid. But I’m not sure that’s something ANYBODY wants to read.
As I’ve grown up, I’ve gradually gotten sick less and less. And when I do fall ill, it usually does not last very long. When it does happen though, I have this terrible habit of pushing through it instead of staying home or going to the doctor. I guess I’m afraid I’ll miss too much school time or parts of my life. “Ha, you thought you could get me to stay home and play video games all day Mr. virus? Well guess again! Hello friends of mine from school, cough cough.”
In the past five years, there have only been two instances I can recall being sick for longer than a day. Being the healthy boy that I am and all.
The first time occurred in my freshman year of high school. I don’t remember what it was, but it made me cough a lot and just feel terrible in general. It didn’t start becoming a problem until a couple of days in. I had to fight it and get through the school day. I wasn’t going down without a fight. You can’t rob me of an education! Only corona virus can do that.
Unfortunately, I had to accept defeat and stay home the next day. I forgot what it was like to stay home from school. It’s kind of nice. You get to lay in bed all day, watch television, and your parents get you anything you need. It’s like being a baby, only sick!
The second time happened during my freshman year of college. Every once in a while I’d wake up with a sore throat. It usually went away once I ate some breakfast. But there was one time near the end of October where the pain wouldn’t go away. The sore throat slowly turned into a persistent cough that stayed with me for a while.
It got pretty bad at times. Every once in a while I would have a coughing fit in the middle of class. Which was perfect for all the presentations we had in my leadership class. “And so, in conclusion…” (COUGH COUGH COUGH COUGH COUGH).
A lot of people on my floor noticed the coughing fits too. After a month or so of the persistent cough, they urged me to go see student health. Lots of times actually. Eventually I gave into their “peer pressure” and went. I got diagnosed with a sinus infection (not corona virus, dad!) and was given some pills to help me out. Just like that, my month-long cough ended in a week.
Looking back, it was kind of stupid for me to wait that long. I tried too hard to play Superman and pretend I could tough it out. Spoiler alert: you can’t just make an illness go away by will power. You can’t just get a cough and say “I’m not getting sick. Just not doing it!”
While illnesses like these are temporary, diseases are more long term. In my life, I have only been diagnosed with one disease: Dermatomyositis (or DM for short). Just to give a brief description of DM, it is an inflammatory disease that creates a bunch of skin rashes and muscle weakness (and sometimes itchy eyes).
It all started when I was four years old. Good old 2005, the year that gave us cinematic treasures such as Batman Begins and the only good Star Wars prequel. Unfortunately, it also gave us Hurricane Katrina, which was ironically around when this all began.
My parents started noticing all these rashes on my knuckles and being a lot less energetic than I usually was. When your kid isn’t bouncing off the walls 24/7, you know something’s up. They took me to my Pediatrician to figure out what was wrong with me. Apparently this was a huge deal to even her, as she couldn’t even tell my mother what was going on.
They referred us to a doctor at A.I Dupont, a pretty big and well known hospital in Delaware. The doctor diagnosed me with Muscular Dystrophy, a muscular disease that eventually leads to death in your early teen’s. Now you may be questioning two things about that sentence: 1.) I’m not dead (I promise I’m not writing this from beyond the grave), and 2.) That’s not DM.
Well, apparently this doctor misdiagnosed me and freaked the hell out of my parents. What an asshole! All he did was a few tests and still came to a false result? What kind of healthcare is that? I’d get better results if I just asked my parents what was wrong.
In fact, I DID get better results from my parents. They did actual research ON THEIR OWN and determined that I had DM. They referred me to another doctor that, doing a better job than the last one, came to the same answer.
Fun fact: Everything I have just written about my condition is pretty new information to me. I was four, there is no way I could remember stuff in this much detail. I found this out a few months ago when my mom came up to visit me on campus. She got back from one of her leadership seminars that she teaches and was showing me all of the stories she told of me and my family.
I was a little disturbed at some of this information. The idea that a medical professional would tell others that I’m gonna die young is frightening. What’s more is that my real condition would have killed me if left untreated. That’s certainly something I needed to end my Friday on.
As you can guess from my previous assertion, I am still alive, currently writing this post. But the process of treatment was very tough on me. This is when the story shifts more to my perspective. I spent a good amount of time in the hospital during this time, where I would have to receive multiple IV’s and just be uncomfortable all the time from all the treatments. It was a bad era in my life, one that I don’t remember very well.
Once I did get released from the hospital, I still had to revisit every month to receive an IV as part of my treatment. Sure, the needle part was always a terrible two minutes of my life and it took 6 or 7 hours for the fluids to enter my veins, but it got me out of school early and I always got to watch movies in bed all day. Wasn’t a total loss of a day.
After my initial hospital release, I had to endure a long chain of medicines and treatments for the coming years. A lot of my medications were hard to swallow (get it?) and created some of the toughest moments of my childhood.
It started out with anabolic steroids to help me properly grow my weakened muscles. The steroids had some unfortunate side effects though. My cheeks become red and puffy, I looked like one of those jolly kids you see on kindergarten posters. Except I wasn’t jolly, the steroids turned me into a rotten little kid. It was terrible. But at least I can say that I took steroids at one point in my life. Everyone is gonna think I’m sooooo cool.
After taking steroids, my medication changed to these small orange pills. The pills were the powdery, granite ones that dissolve easily. They looked like this:
The problem with these pills is that I had to take seven of them a week, all in one sitting. I always threw up trying to take them. In retrospect, orange juice might not have been the best drink to down them. I hated taking those pills, no bribe my parents gave me to take my pills could convince me otherwise.
They finally changed my medication again from a pill to a liquid. This solved very little. Have you ever looked at the liquid inside of a flu shot and wondered what that tasted like? Me neither, but I imagine it would taste something similar to this. That liquid was the most horrendous thing I have ever had to ingest, and that was after the orange pills. I always hated Wednesdays cause I knew that is when I had to take it. I tried to mask the taste with soda, but all that did was stop me from touching a root beer for several years.
The medication changes only got worse. After the liquid, I had to start getting needle injections from my parents. I already had a disdain for needles, being a kid and all, but getting them weekly in my thigh was more than I could bear. My dislike for Wednesdays changed to Sundays as I would often hide in fear of whichever parent had to stick me. The end of the new Simpsons episode signified time for me to get my shot. But it was the end of my painful medications.
My final medication were these little capsules I had to take twice a day every day. Unlike the pills, these didn’t invoke gag reflexes and were tolerable. I had to wake up earlier than usual to take them, but I just went right back to sleep afterwards. Why couldn’t I take THAT all those years? I’m sure there is some good reason, but it would have saved me from a lot of suffering.
This continued until I was free of DM all together.
I wouldn’t say that DM interfered with my entire childhood. If not for those treatments, my childhood would have had a much quicker ending. And after initially leaving the hospital, it only became a problem once a week. My childhood was fairly normal aside from that.
It’s very easy to get sick in today's world, especially during this corona virus pandemic. Enjoy your health now while it is completely intact. Be thankful you aren’t blowing your nose in bed all day or taking medications that make you vomit. And most important, make smart decisions with your health. You never know when it will get taken away from you.
Until the next one (not the next shot), stay Mattastic!
Comments