Moves and Counter-Moves

    There were specific experiences that made me remember things I'd rather not remember. For example, opening a new pill bottle will take me back to my extended stay in the hospital. That signature sterile smell gets me every time. Hearing a sad song I listened to a lot back then causes a similar response. These haunting memories are yet another instance of me feeling like my problems keep getting compounded. It's bad enough these things had happened to me at all but now every time I take new pills I have to relive the memories. It often makes me feel like I'm playing a game of chess against my own body. It attacks, I make a counter-move. It doesn't let me sleep, so I take sleeping pills. I sleep a little better, but then the pills have side effects. I take other pills to deal with the side effects of the original pills. But then uh oh: the pills that you just spent 2 years perfecting the dosage of stopped working because they built up tolerance. So I take more pills to get the same effect. But uh oh again, now I'm taking too many pills. My new pills start interacting with the old ones to the point where I could have died (remember my shpeel on Serotonin Syndrome?) That made me have to stop those pills and start over, while I was at summer camp I might add. Years later, I'm taking so many pills that it puts me at risk for diabetes. Uh oh there too because university is right around the corner so I have to either take the pills and go which risks diabetes or don't go for yet another a year and fall even further behind all my friends. Moves and counter-moves, just like a game of chess. Only one thing's for certain: whoever wins in the constant chess struggle between myself and my body, it always ends with pieces of me being knocked over.
 
   Sometimes it feels like there's a god who gets sick pleasure in reminding me it could always be worse. One of the more painful occurrences I put with with are tendon slips. They come and go from time to time and while it's happening I can feel the little tendon ball in my wrist moving around out of its proper place. The last time it happened I tried reading a book to distract myself. Unfortunately, moving my arm even in the slightest possible manner brought the pain back in full force. I dropped the book and hit my head on my desk trying to pick it up. I finally resigned to myself to the shitty situation, put the book down, and closed my eyes leaning back into my chair. Even that was denied to me because as, I'll, closing my eyes voluntary resulted in them twitching non-stop. That was a sudden development. One day my eyes just start twitching like that, triggered by seemingly nothing. I saw a neuro-ophthalmologist who said he couldn't explain it but that it was benign and not dangerous. I never found a medical professional who could offer a hypothesis. It goes away temporarily after I use my medicinal marijuana so I assume it's some weird side effect from that.

     In June of 2015 I was still mopping up my last few high school credits. At that point I still wanted to be a veterinarian so I did a co op at my local veterinary clinic. I got to assist with surgery, meet the clients, and inject vaccines into the cat and dog patients. I had a great time, learned a lot, and got along well with the staff... except for one incident. I managed to find the actual message I sent a few days after this incident happened so I'll just quote it here.
"So I had an incident at the vet clinic a few days ago. I asked the veterinarian about his thoughts on me being one in terms of my health issues, and he said he didn't think I would be able to work in a clinic but there are plenty of other tasks for veterinarians to do. So that was fine, but then he when on a tirade about how he doesn't think I'm pushing my limits in terms of my legs. I said I've had this for 6 years but he persisted, essentially saying I could be trying harder. That hurt to hear, so I replied by saying something I'm not sure i should of said. I told him that the pain is so bad I had attempted suicide in the past, and he said people don't care. This is true but I wasn't saying it to get sympathy or pity, I said it defend myself from accusations of laziness. He said sorry for being blunt and I said I appreciate his honesty. I told my teacher and guidance counselor about it and they reacted more aggressively than I expected them to, saying it was harassment and discrimination and asking me if I want to pursue legal action or stop the co op. I said no because it is a great test for me to be working closely with someone I don't like and also just because I don't think it warrants an alarmist response. Both the veterinarian and I have put it behind us and essentially have pretended it never happened, so it's not impeding my learning or working in any way."

This should never have happened but I was happy with the way I handled this situation. I eventually decided working in a clinic was unrealistic for me and consequently turned my aspirations into becoming a lawyer. 

   Due to the fact that I seem to need four times as many medications as an average person to get the same effect we did a $1000 enzyme test that proved absolutely freaking worthless. It showed that I should be metabolizing the medications normally, at least from an enzyme perspective. The theory was that I didn't have the proper enzymes to digest the medicine. As the test showed, this is not the case. To this day we still have no real explanation as to why I need so many pills. It's known that people with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome are both less affected by medications yet have more side effects from them. To know more than that I suppose I'll just have to wait for future advancements in medicine to find out what's really going on here.