Current Location: Washington, DC
Arrival Date: January 08, 2011
Departure Date: Undetermined
I have set myself against doing any more schoolwork tonight so I may as well write. The topic of this email is something that makes me unhappy and so I will start by talking about the things I most like about my life.
It has occurred to me that life is wonderful by default. That is, if I just lay quietly somewhere with your eyes closed and endeavor to think about nothing in particular, or about some simple thing, like the color white for example, that sensation is marvelous. Since traveling, I have developed a profound appreciation for just sitting in my temperature controlled room, or any temperature controlled and mosquito-free area really. It is truly incredible to sit somewhere for as long as you care to without being too hot or too cold or constantly bitten by small animals. I really love it. When nothing else is going particularly well, I bask in how happy it makes me. I even giggle to myself when I go to sleep at night when I remember how outrageously lucky it is that there are institutions out there willing to loan me enough money that I can afford to live and go to school in such comfort.
On top of that, there are probably far too many good things to mention. I have very good parents. Much better parents I think than most people have. Then again, I don’t know most people’s parents. But I suspect that not all of them are as good. Mine care about me a lot and they never fail to show it. It is very lucky. I also have an amazing best friend. He has good parents too. I miss them.
The last many days have been difficult. I am upset with my hematologist. My anger is magnified by a bunch of steroids that she had me taking in promise that it would bring my platelets high enough to undergo a procedure to stop my over-abundant bleeding. Five days into the steroids, when my platelets were high enough to perform the procedure, she refused to write a note of approval, stating that it was perfectly okay with her that the procedure be performed but that it was up to the other doctor to decide whether to perform it despite the fact that my counts, though five times as high as normal for me are still less than a quarter as high as normal for someone else. The other doctor, not knowing anything about ITP, hematology, or my specific situation, demanded affirmative approval from my hematologist. I had spent over 20 hours and a lot of emotional energy making and preparing for the necessary appointments, five in total, and the disappointment of being denied care was devastating.
The worst part of the whole experience by far though is the withdrawal. The steroids themselves make me feel awful; they fill me with the sensation of anger and make me prone to outbursts of emotional irrationality and unkindness. They caused me incredible problems my 1L year and I have nothing but sincere hatred for them. Steroids are also one of a few truly physically addictive substances and the process of weaning off of them is incredibly painful. The symptoms are like that of a flu or cold—chills, body aches, congestion, headaches—combined with random outbursts of hellish emotion that leave me shaking and gasping for breath. I have to take sleeping pills to make it go away at night and even then, I do not sleep well. Today is the 10th day since I started them. It feels like it has been forever. I keep hoping that today is the last day of withdrawal. Maybe tomorrow.
Love,
Melissa
Monday, January 30, 2012
Sunday, January 22, 2012
Random Law School Update 30
Last Location: Denver-Boulder-Steamboat-Pagosa Springs, Colorado; Tampa, Florida; Tucson, Arizona
Arrival Date: December 17, 2011
Departure Date: January 08, 2011
Current Location: Washington, DC
Arrival Date: January 08, 2011
Departure Date: Undetermined
This week has been hard medically. I have been inflicted with severe anemia due to an excessive loss of blood. I feel emotional and fatigued, I get winded going up a single flight of stairs, I gasp for air in spin class, and my vision goes black when I stand up too quickly. Not to mention the unsettling amount of bleeding – gentlemen, you don't want to know. My doctors get mad at me, but they don't really have any solutions. They just tell me to find a new hematologist, which is harder than it sounds. Online physician listings offer little more than name and location and I don't come from a family of doctors who would know what to look for in a good physician. And then there is the issue of health insurance, and of travel. I am limited because I don't have a car, or much free time.
One of my general practitioners finally got fed up with it on Thursday and trapped me in the Student Health Office. She called a security guard and made me take an escort to the hospital (I had refused an ambulance for fear that my insurance wouldn't fully cover it). Then I had to wait in the Emergency Room for a bunch of nurses and doctors come in to ask me the same questions over and over again and to take the same panel of blood tests that my doctor got mad at me for ordering just a few days prior – I had come to try to keep the blood in, not to have more taken out! The nurse came in to insert my IV; I turned to look just in time to see dark blood splatter across my arm. And I panicked, for the first time in over a year. The entire wing of the hospital erupted in commotion, the women next to me nearly falling out if her bed to see what is happening. I was mortified. I left several hours later just as lightheaded and groggy as I came in, with even less blood in me, and without any treatment to stop the bleeding. I stopped by the Whole Foods on my way home and picked up an herb know to regulate menstrual cycles. The next morning, for the first time in 12 days, the bleeding was visibly lighter.
Sometimes I get scared. Not the kind of scared-of-death scared that people write about in troubled poetry or confess in their deepest moments of despair. I think that I am pretty secure with my mortality. My scared is more like the type you might get when it occurs to you that there is a chance – however small – that you will fail this next exam, despite your best efforts and despite the fact that you have never failed before. That, mixed with the queasy-sick feeling you get after watching a slasher film where every item of scenery manages to find itself covered in the blood of hapless stock characters.
My biggest fear though, during the hardest weeks, is that I will overburden my closest friends. It happened once, my 1L year, and I have never ceased to regret it. Now, when I am at my most scared, I shut myself in my room alone and lay in bed shaking, until I realize that even at my worst, I am okay. Perhaps I should be embarrassed to write this, but it has occurred to me, at least I think, that most of us have moments like this – even those for whom nothing ever seems to go wrong.
Having a medical condition and being a law student is hard. I tell myself that it is better than, say, had I been a professional mountain-biker or base-jumping instructor – something that I might have to quit outright. This is hard in much more subtle ways. Looking for a job is hard because I am not sure what to tell employers about why I am not graduating with my peers, or why I have decided, after much deliberation, to take a reduced course-load to make time for medical appointments and alternative therapies. It is hard to explain to my peers why I don't go out that often, or why I drink so little when I do. It is hard telling people that I went to Colorado with my parents and didn't ski. It is hard explaining to doctors that, yes, I care about my health, but that I can't submit to treatments that risk making it difficult or impossible to study for weeks on end. And it is hard to admit to myself that my body probably needs more rest than I am willing to give it.
Things are looking up this week. I always hate to end on an awkward, "no I am not better yet" note. You always want to tell these stories in the past tense, like "all of these awful things happened and then after, everything was okay!" Those are the best stories, in part, because you are still around to tell them, but also because they go to show that bad things, by and large, tend to get better and leave our lives richer and more colorful than they were when we began. I have committed to telling my story from the middle though, and with that comes the possibility that things won't end particularly well. Of course that is the brilliance of it all, the suspense. And having an opportunity to care, because you know at any given moment you may be empowered to affect the outcome. One thing I have always hated about reading amazing stories about interesting people who have long since come and gone (or in the case of fiction, never been) is the feeling that I am forever denied an opportunity to be a part of their story. But then I remember that there are interesting people all around me who are right now in the middle of their stories. And I do my best to be a part of them. You all are part of mine now.
Love,
Melissa
Arrival Date: December 17, 2011
Departure Date: January 08, 2011
Current Location: Washington, DC
Arrival Date: January 08, 2011
Departure Date: Undetermined
This week has been hard medically. I have been inflicted with severe anemia due to an excessive loss of blood. I feel emotional and fatigued, I get winded going up a single flight of stairs, I gasp for air in spin class, and my vision goes black when I stand up too quickly. Not to mention the unsettling amount of bleeding – gentlemen, you don't want to know. My doctors get mad at me, but they don't really have any solutions. They just tell me to find a new hematologist, which is harder than it sounds. Online physician listings offer little more than name and location and I don't come from a family of doctors who would know what to look for in a good physician. And then there is the issue of health insurance, and of travel. I am limited because I don't have a car, or much free time.
One of my general practitioners finally got fed up with it on Thursday and trapped me in the Student Health Office. She called a security guard and made me take an escort to the hospital (I had refused an ambulance for fear that my insurance wouldn't fully cover it). Then I had to wait in the Emergency Room for a bunch of nurses and doctors come in to ask me the same questions over and over again and to take the same panel of blood tests that my doctor got mad at me for ordering just a few days prior – I had come to try to keep the blood in, not to have more taken out! The nurse came in to insert my IV; I turned to look just in time to see dark blood splatter across my arm. And I panicked, for the first time in over a year. The entire wing of the hospital erupted in commotion, the women next to me nearly falling out if her bed to see what is happening. I was mortified. I left several hours later just as lightheaded and groggy as I came in, with even less blood in me, and without any treatment to stop the bleeding. I stopped by the Whole Foods on my way home and picked up an herb know to regulate menstrual cycles. The next morning, for the first time in 12 days, the bleeding was visibly lighter.
Sometimes I get scared. Not the kind of scared-of-death scared that people write about in troubled poetry or confess in their deepest moments of despair. I think that I am pretty secure with my mortality. My scared is more like the type you might get when it occurs to you that there is a chance – however small – that you will fail this next exam, despite your best efforts and despite the fact that you have never failed before. That, mixed with the queasy-sick feeling you get after watching a slasher film where every item of scenery manages to find itself covered in the blood of hapless stock characters.
My biggest fear though, during the hardest weeks, is that I will overburden my closest friends. It happened once, my 1L year, and I have never ceased to regret it. Now, when I am at my most scared, I shut myself in my room alone and lay in bed shaking, until I realize that even at my worst, I am okay. Perhaps I should be embarrassed to write this, but it has occurred to me, at least I think, that most of us have moments like this – even those for whom nothing ever seems to go wrong.
Having a medical condition and being a law student is hard. I tell myself that it is better than, say, had I been a professional mountain-biker or base-jumping instructor – something that I might have to quit outright. This is hard in much more subtle ways. Looking for a job is hard because I am not sure what to tell employers about why I am not graduating with my peers, or why I have decided, after much deliberation, to take a reduced course-load to make time for medical appointments and alternative therapies. It is hard to explain to my peers why I don't go out that often, or why I drink so little when I do. It is hard telling people that I went to Colorado with my parents and didn't ski. It is hard explaining to doctors that, yes, I care about my health, but that I can't submit to treatments that risk making it difficult or impossible to study for weeks on end. And it is hard to admit to myself that my body probably needs more rest than I am willing to give it.
Things are looking up this week. I always hate to end on an awkward, "no I am not better yet" note. You always want to tell these stories in the past tense, like "all of these awful things happened and then after, everything was okay!" Those are the best stories, in part, because you are still around to tell them, but also because they go to show that bad things, by and large, tend to get better and leave our lives richer and more colorful than they were when we began. I have committed to telling my story from the middle though, and with that comes the possibility that things won't end particularly well. Of course that is the brilliance of it all, the suspense. And having an opportunity to care, because you know at any given moment you may be empowered to affect the outcome. One thing I have always hated about reading amazing stories about interesting people who have long since come and gone (or in the case of fiction, never been) is the feeling that I am forever denied an opportunity to be a part of their story. But then I remember that there are interesting people all around me who are right now in the middle of their stories. And I do my best to be a part of them. You all are part of mine now.
Love,
Melissa
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