Dancing with My Disabilities!: When Life Gives You Lemons...

Blog Title: Dancing with My Disabilities! This blog was I Already Gave My Right Arm to Be Ambidextrous prior to Read My HIPS, which is now Dancing with My Disabilities. I am doing some renovating and will begin blogging for the New Year 2024. Please be patient, and please continue to support this blog as well as my other blog Chronically Mommy, which is also being renovated to be more up to date. Pass this information on to anyone that you know may be interested in knowing...To be continued...

Dancing with My Disabilities!

Title: Dancing with My Disabilities! I had my shoulder and both hips replaced, and I am changing things up a bit on this blog! I began belly dancing in 2010! Yes, you read that correctly!! I am going to be blogging about my experience as a woman with several joint diseases and conditions who had her shoulder and both hips replaced who now belly dances, dances hip hop, performs, teaches dance to children of all ages and abilities, teaches belly dance fitness classes to adult women, teaches chair belly dance movement classes to people with mobility issues and disabilities, and takes a Pure Barre class as well! I still have pain, but I want to blog about how I have fun too! Please read Chronically Mommy (chronicallymommy.blogspot.com) for info on health/pain and being a mom to a 13-year-old son. I have avascular necrosis in my shoulders, hips, and knees, psoriatic arthritis, axial spondylitis, Sjogren's, fibromyalgia, hEDS, POTS, MCAS, vascular/ocular/hemiplegic migraines, pseudotumor cerebri, trigeminal neuralgia, occipital neuralgia, endometriosis, and chronic shingles. I found out that I have autoimmune arthritis in my cervical spine and a bulging disk in my lumbar spine. Fourteen years ago, my spine orthopedic surgeon told me I had a small amount of inflammatory arthritis in my SI joint. The question was if the spinal involvement was due to Psoriatic Spondylitis, which is a more severe form of Psoriatic Arthritis or is it a new diagnosis of Ankylosing Spondylitis? Now, they have an updated term, Axial Spondylitis, which fits my symptoms and diagnostic proof. Whatever the diagnosis, the treatment will remain the same. I had my left hip replaced in 2003; my right shoulder replaced in March of 2010. I gave my right arm to be ambidextrous! LOL! Lastly, I had my right hip replaced on May 10th, 2012, and I began belly dancing two years prior to my right hip replacement surgery. Yes that's correct! I began belly dancing in 2010, just after my shoulder replacement, before my son was born. I performed for the first time in 2012, five days prior to my right hip replacement surgery. Pain is still another part of my life. It is just a question of when, where, and how much, but I would like to use this blog to write about my experience as a woman with several joint diseases and conditions who had both hips and a shoulder replaced and now spends her free time dancing, teaching, and performing! I began dancing with a troupe in February of 2014, Seshambeh Dance Company. I now take a Pure Barre class on Monday mornings, teach ballet, tap, and creative movement on Monday evenings to children of all ages and abilities, take a hip hop class with all adult women on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, teach a belly dance fitness class on Thursdays to all adult women, and teach a chair belly dance movement class to people with mobility issues and disabilities as often as I possibly can. Join me in my journey! At times, I take 16 to 20 pills a day. I give myself an injection each week on Fridays for my autoimmune/autoinflammatory arthritis diseases. Just when one thing is doing better, something else goes downhill! My attitude, however, is always going uphill! I am 49 years old, have been married for 24 years, and my husband and I adopted Mick in Dec. of 2010! I have a lot on my plate right now, but I take it one moment at a time. I believe that God will never give me more than I can handle. However, I do need to learn to ask for help sometimes instead of always doing it by myself!

Help, I need somebody,
Help, not just anybody,
Help, you know I need someone, help.

When I was younger, so much younger than today,
I never needed anybody's help in any way.
But now these days are gone, I'm not so self assured,
Now I find I've changed my mind and opened up the doors.

Help me if you can, I'm feeling down
And I do appreciate you being round.
Help me, get my feet back on the ground,
Won't you please, please help me.

And now my life has changed in oh so many ways,
My independence seems to vanish in the haze.
But every now and then I feel so insecure,
I know that I just need you like I've never done before.

Help me if you can, I'm feeling down
And I do appreciate you being round.
Help me, get my feet back on the ground,
Won't you please, please help me.

When I was younger, so much younger than today,
I never needed anybody's help in any way.
But now these daya are gone, I'm not so self assured,
Now I find I've changed my mind and opened up the doors.

Help me if you can, I'm feeling down
And I do appreciate you being round.
Help me, get my feet back on the ground,
Won't you please, please help me, help me, help me, oh.

Friday, February 19, 2010

When Life Gives You Lemons...

Welcome to the July Pain-Blog Carnival for How To Cope With Pain, some of this month’s great writing related to pain from other blogs and websites. I hope you enjoy the selections! Mine was one of them!

I'm sure you've heard that before: When life gives you lemons, make lemonade...Well after a while, can there just be too damn many lemons?!? I mean, eventually, there is just no room for lemonade, or what if you don't even like lemonade? I actually don't really like lemonade. I like lemons themselves in tea or water or to clean with, but still, when they are basically flying at you and falling from the sky, and you don't know what to do with the damn lemons anymore, you have just had enough already, right?

OK, maybe lemons are just not a good analogy...

What I'm trying to get at, or basically just trying to say is that I have reached my breaking point. I can no longer make lemonade out of what has been given to me. Now, I'm a positive person, so this is hard to do to me. How did I get to this point?...Well, it seemed like each year I was diagnosed with 1 or 2 or 3 new diseases. I could handle that. Then we had to get the diseases treated. I could handle that. Then we had to get the diseases under control. I could handle that. Then the diseases would get out of control at different times. I could handle that. What I'm finding hard to handle is when they all start to get out of control at one time! That is what I'm finding hard, no wait, IMPOSSIBLE to deal with!!!!

The fibromyalgia gets under control for a while, but it flares just as my right shoulder collapses from the avascular necrosis. I have to stop using my cane for my right hip because my fingers decide to get all f***ed up at the same time!!! Meanwhile, my ankles become cankles! How the hell did that happen!!! They have swollen up so badly that I have no ankles anymore--crazy shit right? Oh and what about my elbows. They just don't work anymore. And my neck, that is of no use to me anymore. My lower back--the list goes on and on.......

So, today I go to see the rheumatologist. He looks at my fingers and tells me that I'm overdoing things, that I just can't do as much as I used to do when I was healthy, when I was NORMAL is what his brain was telling me. I'm not a normal person anymore. I KNOW that! I just don't always admit it to myself or to others, and I don't always accept it either. I think they call it DENIAL!! I'm not always in denial though. I go in and out of it. It is a state of mind for me. Most of the time, I completely understand and work within my limitations. Those other less often times, I set my goals and expectations extremely high. What happens is that I reach them just once and I'm done for. Once I reach them, I think I can do it again and quite possibly again. That is when I get into trouble with myself. That is when I cause problems with my body fighting back, and it's World War III inside and outside of my body, yes, yours truly!

Why do I do this to myself? I was just telling my friend yesterday that people with chronic illnesses, especially those that involve pain and arthritis, are the most stubborn people I know. I'm allowed to say this because I'm at the top of that list. I am so stubborn, type A personality, an overachiever, and a control freak! So isn't it strange that we would be the ones that would end up with a disease that forces us to give things up, makes us stay in bed, and stops us dead in our tracks? Or maybe it isn't that strange after all...Nothing a shot in the ass can't fix!!! Well, it can't hurt anyway. LOL!

1 comment:

Evelyn ecorsini@inflexxion.com said...: Hi Dana, I like what you wrote a lot. It is funny and real. You write well. I manage content for a couple of web sites and I am interested in having material on young adults with chronic pain making the decision to become parents. If this interests you, please contact me. Thanks.; July 29, 2010 at 8:23 AM

It's Time You Understood.

I want you to understand that your arthritis is not the same as mine if you tell me "I have arthritis too in my knee sometimes." That is not what I have. I have autoimmune arthritis. I have fatigue, pain, and stiffness in every joint in my body, take very serious medications like biologics which is in IV form every 4 weeks at the hospital's infusion center and chemotherapy pills. The type of autoimmune arthritis diseases that I have affects my eyes, my lungs, my heart, my skin, my ligaments, my tendons, my salivary glands, as well as my joints. Please visit www.causes.com/WorldAutoimmuneArthritisDay to donate $5 for the cause.