The Beginning

I knew something was wrong the evening of my breakdown. It was nearing Christmas, I was just starting a long anticipated three-week vacation from work, I had so many great plans…and here I was standing in my kitchen at 9pm, covered in flour, and crying. You see, my four-year-old son had been begging me for days to bake gingerbread cookies with him. He’d been going through a gingerbread man phase since reading a book, and this was all he’d been asking to do. Day after day, I kept promising him that we would bake some “tomorrow”, but everyday I’d disappoint. Not because I didn’t want to. I really wanted to! But I’d been feeling so run down and sick that I just couldn’t. This sickness had started back in September and for some reason I just couldn’t shake it. Months of feeling this way left me feeling so drained.  So everyday, rather than play with the kids and bake cookies, I wanted to do nothing. I wanted to sleep.  I wanted to lay down on the couch, and then I wanted to sleep some more.  In fact, it got to a point where I’d often go to bed for the night before my two year old. I was just so fatigued. But this day I decided I was tired of disappointing my kids. We WOULD bake cookies the next day. I decided to break the task up by preparing the dough that night after the kids were in bed. So I got to work. But that’s the thing. It really shouldn’t have been work. Mixing up a bowl of dough (in a stand mixer even!) should absolutely not be work. But for me it was. It was exhausting and depleting. It took longer than it should, and by the end I stood there crying, covered in flour and sticky molasses and thought to myself “this can’t be normal”. I stuck the dough in the fridge, slowly tidied up, poured myself a small glass of wine, and contacted a friend from work to ask a favor.

I’ll back up here and explain how things got to this point because it certainly wasn’t an overnight illness. Although I can say for certain that I was very ill since the fall, I can also say for certain that I was not quite well for much longer than that. During the summer I was fairly tired and had a constant runny nose. But that didn’t seem too unusual. Afterall, I have two young kids! I figured germs and tiredness where just a normal part of motherhood. It was only in the fall that things got worse. Early fall my constant runny nose only got worse, forming red, painful sores around my nostrils. There was nothing I could do besides sniff, rub, and blow my nose all day, which became increasingly painful. Under my nose became so irritated that I kept getting cold sores right at the base of one of my nostrils. The cold sores were then constantly being aggravated by my runny nose. It was awful! Around this time, I also developed intermittent pain and burning in my eyes. It happened a few times at work. I’d be working when all of a sudden my eyes would feel like they were on fire and become so watery that I’d have to step out (little did I know, this symptom would get so much worse!).  

There were also a few other hints that something wasn’t right. I had been experiencing a mental fog that I though was anxiety (but I now actually think was some work anxiety due to the fog!). I had a constant cough, but chalked it up to “well, it is the season!” even though my kids weren’t sick. Eventually I went to my doctor and asked for something for my anxiety as well as advice about my nose/colds. I left with a prescription for a low dose antianxiety pill as well as a cream for my nose. But really, she too just figured it was the season for colds, so really there wasn’t much to be done at that point.

It wasn’t until November and December that things got really bad. I mean, REALLY bad. I always refer to this time period as The Storm because it was such a low and life altering point for me. Honestly at times I wondered if I’d ever get through it and feel somewhat normal again. I just wanted things to be okay. Up until then, I knew I was rundown and not well, but I had no idea how bad things would get. I had been working extra shifts at work in preparation for some anticipated time off. I was working per diem since the summer, meaning I only get paid for my time worked, no sick time or holidays. So I was working lots to put money aside to offset the time off and squirrel away some extra money for Christmas. Working extra while feeling run down and fatigued was not fun, but I continued. My “cold” got worse. I couldn’t breath through my nose at all. Not one bit of air could get through. I quickly lost all ability to smell, which soon became a loss of ability to taste as well. My nose kept bleeding and soon I developed large painful cracks on my tongue, accompanied by an oral candida infection. On top of this, at this point I had now had five different cold sore outbreaks in only a month and a half. This couldn’t be normal? Back to the doctors I went. A prescription for an oral rinse to combat the mouth infections, another prescription for an antiviral for my coldsores, and a recommendation for a nasal saline rinse. These were all reasonable actions for my doctor. Certainly during cold and flu season there would be no reason to think it would be anything more. But of course the medications didn’t help and we soon added an antibiotic because I’d developed some intense sinus, teeth, and jaw pain. That too didn’t help. In fact, I was feeling worse than ever. 

At this point, life had been reduced to work, home, dinner, sleep, repeat. There was no joy. I was missing out on precious time with my kids. I was stressed at work. I was falling asleep shivering, crying, and wishing I felt better so that I could be the kind of wife, mother, employee, PERSON that I wanted to be. How could I emerge from this? Until this point, I had been exercising regularly (though you’d never be able to tell!), I’d been popping vitamins and sleeping plenty. I’d been trying hard to get better, but now I felt like giving up.  Here I was at 33 years of age, taking nine medications a day (15 pills, a steroid nasal spray, an antifungal mouth rinse, and a antibiotic nose cream) and a pile of vitamins and supplements, yet feeling worse than ever. Something was wrong. It was on the evening of My Breakdown that I knew this wasn’t okay.