Posted 2/25/2011 12:11 AM (GMT 0)
I'm a 44 year old female and happily married to a very supportive husband. I have struggled with health problems for the last 10+ years. I had a total hysterectomy when I was 31 and that caused a lot of problems with hormones as I could not absorb the synthetic hormones but natural didn't seem to help either.Even with the health problems I will list below, I still worked full time up until I was laid off 3 weeks ago.
I have had problems with stomach pains and had to have my gallbladder out about 9 years ago. But that helped but I still kept having stomach pains and just aching pains in the stomach and groin area. This went on for years before I was finally diagnosed. Approximately 4 years ago I was diagnosed with Interstitial Cystitis. I have good days and bad days but it seems like the bad days are getting to be more and more. The only comfort I have is in a lying position (with a pillow under my knees) or a reclining position. Laying straight, sitting straight up or standing (seems like it "stretches" my abdomen area and causes pain) is hard on me for more than 15 min of standing or 30-40 min of sitting upright. So it is getting harder and harder to sit at a desk. My last scope of my bladder showed that my bladder lining is bleeding mildly, which they say is normal with this condition's progression. I do have UTI's but I am blessed to say they aren't extremely frequently and most people battling this condition have UTI's pretty frequently. I have sharp shooting pains a lot of days but not every single day but every day I do have a general soreness in the pelvic and abdomen area.
Well after complaining for 10+ years about my memory problems, hard to get started in the mornings, aches and pains all the time, a feeling like I can never get enough sleep, blurry vision that comes and goes throughout the day, still having stomach pains and nausea and just a general feeling of not being well. They finally did a sleep study and found that I have 16 "seizure like" jerks a minute. They didn't call them seizures just seizure like jerking. It showed that out of 8 hours of trying to sleep I fell asleep for 6 1/2 hours, with a total of 45 minutes of REM sleep. So basically, I was only getting 45 minutes of sleep a night. So they thought that was my memory problems and sleepiness. They put me on a few sleeping pills but they all raise my blood pressure too high so I can't take them. They finally put me on Klonapin which helps me to sleep at night but I'm still tired just not as tired as I was. It is hard for me to sit still for more than 1/2 hour to hour max before I'm falling asleep. I can not sit and watch tv or read a book because I'm bobbing my head trying to stay awake but just can't. I don't drive myself anywhere that takes longer than 15-20 minutes as I may start fighting sleep. Another thing that really bothers me is that my memory is getting worse and worse.
Then I was diagnosed about 2 years ago with firbromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome. I'm on Lyrica to help with the generalized aches and pains (it helps some) and Ultram.
My fear is with the progression I have seen in the last 12 to 18 months with my memory has been pretty rapid and just how much more will I lose. Someone can tell me something and if I don't do it immediately (or write it down) then I forget a lot of times. I forget people's names I've known for 20 years. I can be talking and say the word dog in a sentence when I mean cat (just as an example). I can be in the middle of a conversation and just forget what I was talking about. Sometimes I remember after a few minutes of wracking my brain sometimes I don't remember at all or maybe days later I remember what I wanted to say. Or the worse is knowing what I want to say but can't think of the word I want to use. With people I'm close to, who understand my condition, I can try to get them to think of the word for me. I will say, i.e. She is a (pretty) person. Pretty being the word I can't think of so I say to the person I'm talking with, "the word I'm trying to think of is someone that is nice looking or the word means beautiful". Because I can't for the life of me think of the word "pretty". Then after maybe a couple minutes or so sometimes it comes to me if someone doesn't say the word from my descriptions. And that is another thing. I promise I'm an honest person, yet sometimes I can start to tell a story about something that happened and then in the middle or end of the story I realize that doesn't make sense and couldn't be the way something happened. And then the real facts come to me and I say no that's not it. This is what really happened. If you don't know me you would think I was making these stories up as I change the facts because I remembered them wrong when I first starting telling the story. I don't blame people who don't know me to think I make them up because of this. It is an awful feeling to realize how stupid I sound sometimes. I'm not dumb (maybe not the swiftest! LOL! but definitely not dumb). I love trivia and love to play but I can't think of words a lot of times and it drives me nuts because I know the answer. My husband of course gives me time to think of the answer. Sometimes I can come up with the word and sometimes I give up after a few minutes because I just know I'm not going to think of it, even though I know I know it. I forget to pick things up at the store or to do a certain errand. Yes, I make lists but you have to remember to pick the list up before you leave!! My memory is just horrible and the thing that worries me the most is how much worse can it get. I've even lost a lot of my common sense. I really have.
So I know I'm forgetting to tell you more things but this is a lot for people to read any way. I have two questions basically. 1) Is this normal with fibromyalgia (the generalized pain and the memory problems)? 2) Do you think with all of this that I would be approved for disability? I know no one can say for certain but with what I have said do you think I have a good chance of being approved? I know it takes months if not a few years to get approved. It would be very hard financially but I just don't know how much longer I can work with the pain, blurry vision, memory problems and sleepiness. It just is too much most days.
Thanks for listening. And thanks for your input. It's really hard to decide as I'm so young but just not sure what else to do.