This winter has been very bad for my family. Not because of the cold but more in part due to major health issues that some of us have been suffering with. Here's what's been going on.

First off we'll talk about my grandmother.About 8 years ago she suffered a stroke. She didn't have any lingering affects from it other than some speech issues which seemed to come and go. Other than that she was still completely independent of others. This past June 27th she turned 90 years old. We had a family get together to celebrate. One week later she decided to retire to her bed and has been there ever since. She is able to get up and get around but has decided that she no longer wants to. This has created a major problem within the family because there is no one really who can take care of her except for me and my uncle. he and his wife live next door to my grandma and it's his mother. My father and mother also living within walking distance but my mom and dad have their own health issues to deal with. we'll talk about that in a moment. There area 7 grandchildren but only 5 of us live locally. The other 4 (one of them my sister) aside from myself refuse to help out with her. She always dished out $$$$$ when they asked for it and after her stroke I was placed in charge of the $$$ and the once very free flowing cash river came to a screeching halt!!!! So it basically boils down now to no $$$ no help which is really sad. This leaves me and my uncle now having to feed,change and bather her. I certainly hope that it doesn't sound as if i'm complaining about having to do this for her but I have my own set of problems to deal with as well.

Now on to my mom. She has been living with so major heart and lung issues since January of 1992. At that point the doctors gave her 6 months to live but she is still here. Her life since then has pretty much been a living hell. Four years ago she was diagnosed with cervical cancer. She underwent a full month of chemo and radiation ( while doing so suffered a minor stroke) and then on the day of my 40th birthday she had to undergo 3 days of internal radiation. This past December my dad found her screaming in pain one morning while trying to change the bed sheets. He thought she had fallen and broken something so he dialed 911,they sent an ambulance and she was taken to the hospital which is only about a 3 minute drive from their house. She spent 3 days in the hospital almost unresponsive and no one could seem to find out what the problem was.Day four they sent her home. That same night the ambulance came and picked her up again. It was much worse this time around. She spent a week in the hospital this time with the docs telling us it was one thing then another then something else. They then discovered that she has 3 fractured vertebra in her spine. Not sure at this point if cancer has come back and is now in her spine or if the breakage is due to the internal radiation that she had almost 4 years ago. We were told that once they got the bacterial infection that she had cleared up and some other stuff straightened out that they wanted to do a biopsy to look for cancer as well as go in and repair the vertebra. This by the way is all being done at the local hospital,my moms regular doctors are an hour and a half away in Charleston,S.C. The hospital docs didn't want to do anything without first consulting with her doctors who she's been seeing since 92'. When that finally happened her primary docs didn't advise any anesthesia or invasive procedures as in her current state of health she most likely would die from it all. So they sent her home with no treatment at all. She is now having to live with the heart and lung issues as well as 3 broken bones in her back and we were told that she would probably suffer more fractured bones as time goes on. She will be 62 years old in May of this year.This is part of the reason why my dad can not help my uncle and me in taking care of my g-ma which also happens to be my dad's mom. My father also has his own health issues from having had open heart/bypass surgery a few years ago.

Now we get to me. I had a really bad fall back in August of last year at work. I slipped on a wet floor and the last thing I can recall seeing was both feet in front of my eyes!!! It knocked me unconscious for a split second and without giving it a second thought when I came back to my senses or so I though, I immediately jumped up. I was sent to a medical facility that we have to go to when injured on the job,to be checked out. They took about 20 X-rays,developed and read them ,decided there were no immediate dangers,no fractures or anything so I was sent home. Eight weeks later I began having pains in my head that felt at times like little electrical shocks. Then at times it would feel like the beginning of a headache. The pains would sometimes happen once a day then again it could be off and on all day but they went just as quickly as they cam and seemed to be scattered about my head rather than just a central location. Some days I had no pain. Then one morning about 1 am I awoke with a pain like I had never had before in my head. I had to work the next morning and decided at about 1 that afternoon that I really need to go back and see the doctor. At that point I had been having this pain for 12 hours. Headaches normally don't bother but this pain was like someone was in my head with a sledgehammer trying to knock my brain out from the inside!!!

I was at that point advised to have a CT scan and an MRI done which I did. Both came back showing nothing other than an intact skull and healthy brain. I was then sent to a neurologist who put me on 2 different meds for headaches. I began taking them on the second day after seeing him and from that point on have not had any more pains in my head. After a month of takings these drugs I decided i wanted to see how long I could go without them and not have any pains. My main reason for not wanting to take this is that they both carry a serious side effect of kidney damage. I am already on one drug now for just over 2 years which has the same side effect. It's bad enough having one drug work against you with a side effect like that but I surely didn't want to have to be taking 3 of them like that. So I stopped taking the meds that the neurologist gave me and so far I have been almost 2 months with no head pains.

Hopefully things will get back to normal around here soon or at least as close as they can to normal and i'll be able to begin posting more.

David