You don't know what you've got till it's gone

I was an active, healthy 43 year old, in the prime of my life, right at that golden age where you’ve learned enough to take care of yourself, but you’re not too old to enjoy being young. Everything ws going great, I felt like I was playing at my best, I’d just bought a new violin that I loved playing. I was finally beginning to feel comfortable in my own skin and liking myself. I ate well, exercised regularly, meditated daily, was getting into yoga, doing all the right things to take care of myself. I have no risk factors for anything, my blood pressure is perfect. Then it all came crashing down. In a few short months I was reduced to shuffling around the house like an old woman. I needed help getting out of the bathtub. I couldn’t walk more than about a block, couldn’t stand longer than about five minutes without pain. I needed two hands to lift a glass of water. It’s amazing how quickly your health can just be snatched away from you. And for no reason. I didn’t do anything to bring this on. I wasn’t a health nut, but I was conscious of taking care of myself.

It all began with a stressful event that happened last July. I can trace this illness back to that week. So my advice to you is keep that stress from even entering your mind. It’s not enough to release it, don’t let it in in the first place. Don’t engage the things that stress you. If it’s your family, don’t fight back. Just don’t be a part of their shit. Let them do their thing and don’t engage. If it’s work, nothing is more important than your health, let it slide. Stress is a killer. Literally.

It began with my hands. They were sore and stiff in each knuckle. I couldn’t make a fist, and couldn’t straighten them all the way. Like most musicians, I figured it was tendinitis. When I was 20 and in music school I developed tendinitis in all the fingers of both hands, which is fairly rare, I learned. I went to a musician’s clinic, where they tested me for rheumatoid arthritis and osteoarthritis, both negative, neurological problems, which were negative, and I can’t remember what else. The verdict was tendinitis in both hands, ice, anti-inflammatories, and rest. That, as most musicians know, became the standard course of treatment. So that’s what I did. I thought it was a flare up of that old injury. I plunged my hands into ice baths, I stopped playing, I took lots of Advil. It didn’t do a thing.

Then my arms started hurting, elbows, shoulders, and the muscles in my arms ached. I thought that was from this tendinitis I had, that the muscles were sore from working more because of the joint pain. So I decided to take a week off from activity. If I went to a doctor, that’s what they’d tell me, rest. So no violin, no computer, no bike, no gardening, no aerobics, no yoga. All these things hurt my arms. After two days of this my legs started hurting. My knees were sore, and the muscles in my legs felt like I had run a marathon. Well, I thought, I guess I’ll rest that, too. Pain is the body’s signal to stop doing what you’re doing and back off, right? So I didn’t do much that week, trying to recover from these overuse injuries I had.

It took me nearly a year to recover from that. I was much worse after this “rest” than I was before. Now I was having trouble walking. My feet would fall asleep after walking a half a block, then they’d start to hurt. I was getting this weird itching/burning in my hands and feet. I had to give up doing aerobics because my feet hurt too much. I would have a pain someplace for a few days, and then it would move to another place. Like my left knee would be at like a 7 on the pain scale, and then after three or four days it would go away. Then my jaw would hurt. Sometimes I had real trouble eating because I couldn’t open my mouth wide enough to get food in. And then it would go away.

I was getting scared, and beginning to think maybe I had arthritis. The worst possible fate for a violinist. Nothing was helping. I was starting to discover that playing actually made my fingers feel a little better so I started playing again. By now I was having trouble with my wrists as well, at times I was unable to turn them enough to carry a plate on the palm of my hand. My thumbs hurt, too. It took me 20-30 minutes to warm up, but I found I could play pretty well once I did. When I say warm up, I don’t even mean play scales. I had to warm up to playing scales. I would hold the violin, and play on the string closest to the hand one finger at a time- first finger, open string, back and forth until it didn’t hurt anymore. Then I’d do the second finger, and so on. It’s hard to describe, and sometimes I got so impatient with not being able to just play something that I’d quit before I really got to play. The pain made playing not very fun, and sometimes it just wasn’t worth it.

To be continued...