This is surely a premature milestone in my life. I'm wavering between being incredibly depressed that it has come to this, and being all (sing it) "I am strong… I am invincible… I am WOOOMAAAN!" I'm not going to let the fact that I can't balance on a level surface stop me from living a normal life! Right!!
Here's the cane I got:
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Classic Design Folding Cane – Pansie Floral function popUpMedium(URL) { day = new Date(); id = day.getTime(); eval("page" + id + " = window.open(URL, '" + id + "', 'toolbar=0,scrollbars=0,location=0,status=0,menubar=0,resizable=1,width=685,height=550');"); } |
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Quantity in Basket: None Item #: 5250pan |
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It to me says "James Bond"– the way it folds up and can leap out to my rescue as a surprise gadget I can carry in my shoulder bag. The pansies, okay, maybe a little more Miss Marple than James Bond. But if they in ANY small way soothe or cheer me during this ordeal, that's a win.
My very dear and supportive husband tells me to look at it that if I tore my ACL I would not be all weird about needing a cane. I would not feel, as I sort of do at this point, that I had just aged 30 years and suddenly become decrepit. So my inner ear is injured somehow, which remains to be seen exactly how. And like many injuries, while it's healing, a person needs extra support. I hope that it will make the world less terrifying, and that I will be able to go freely about with great confidence. It will be here in a couple days, and then I'll tell you whether it works or not.
Yesterday I met with my vestibular therapist, the pragmatic and warm Gina. However, she ended up doing no therapy on me at all. No walking up and down horrible slanted things, no trying to look at eye charts while she shakes my head from side to side. She just interviewed me about how it's been going, and shortly concluded that she can't help me after all. This was disappointing, in that the vestibular therapy was the one thing I felt was actually going to work. She says that if I have Meniere's, it's not following the normal path, that my daily struggles are more like someone twenty years into it rather than two months. She's wondering what I may have in addition to Meniere's… a viral infection of the labyrinth? A brain tumor? Something else entirely? She said that this point I should probably go to the next level and see this highly, highly specialized otoneurologist– a neurologist who just works with inner ear problems. That he will have much more detailed tests than the normal ENT can do, and he WILL figure out (and one would hope, cure) whatever in the hell is wrong in there.
SO she gave me a name of the oto-neuro-guru in the area, and sure enough he's not covered by our insurance. However, they did say that if I get a written referral from my in-network ENT, and there is no other otoneurologist in the network, they might consider treating paying for it. (Otherwise it's $4,000 deductible, which honestly if it would really cure me I think we would cough up.) Tomorrow I see my ENT again and will work on this, diplomatically trying to get him to agree that this is where we should go from here. Gina encourages me that Dr. Mooney is not arrogant and will be fine with my moving on to the next level. At the very least I think I should get an MRI at this point. I have this nagging worry that I have a brain tumor that's causing all this.
Meanwhile, I'm home full-time with two rambunctious boys. Three weeks to go until school starts, and lots of long days in between. Elias kicked off the day by throwing a flashlight, getting a time-out; throwing a piece of train track, getting a time out; and then throwing a rock at me, and getting a time out! With yelling! And that was only in the first fifteen minutes, before I had even one sip of my tea. He's devoted himself to destroying the house methodically, room by room, all day. Yesterday he crushed crackers all over the kitchen, which I had to clean up. Isaac forgot to turn off the faucet and walked away, such that the bathroom sink over flowed and water actually started to rain down through the floor into the basement. I had to clean that up. Lena dog seems to be having some sort of emotional or medical problem– she peed on Elias's bed! She peed on the floor in the kitchen, and I had to clean THAT and THAT up! Basically I struggled all day to maintain some semblance of order, and still, when Ben came home it was a pretty chaotic scene. And yet, I can't fathom going someplace like the zoo to tire out the little monkeys. I will be dizzy in minutes…
When the cane arrives will it be easier to get them out of the house? And generally to function?
I hope so!