As we feared would happen once I started taking the blood thinners again, I started having some headaches a couple of weeks ago and since last Wednesday, I’ve had a headache that won’t go away. It doesn’t seem to matter how much headache medicine I take. These headaches are a reaction to the blood thinners so nothing works to make them stop except to stop taking the blood thinners, which I can’t really do without a high risk of dying. We were hopeful that this wouldn’t happen this time, but it has. I have to go back to the doctor this week to see if we can find something - perhaps a Beta Blocker - that I might be able to take every day to actually prevent the headaches rather than taking something to try to get rid of them once they’ve already started, since that obviously doesn’t work. Please pray that we’ll find another option. On top of that, all week I’ve been having more severe abdominal and leg pain. I’m starting to feel like a walking time bomb, but I know that the Bible says:

“Because he loves me,” says the LORD, “I will rescue him;
      I will protect him, for he acknowledges my name.

 15 He will call upon me, and I will answer him;
      I will be with him in trouble,
      I will deliver him and honor him.

 16 With long life will I satisfy him
      and show him my salvation.” Psalm 91:14-16
I generally can’t stand complaining (by me or anyone else) so I really try to act like everything is ok, but it is not. I am going to go crazy if I can’t get rid of these headaches. I will NOT let this stop me from living, though, so I’m still writing and working a few hours per week and doing as much as I can with the children. I am happy to answer questions and do the regular work I’ve been doing with homeschooling. If anything, it helps me focus on something else besides the pain for a while so I’m glad to have distraction. Otherwise, I still just have to sleep a lot and that’s good, too, except for the fact that I don’t get much done. : )

If you are dealing with the same sorts of issues, please know that I do understand what you are going through. I talk with homeschool moms all the time who have been inspired by the posts I’ve made on chronic pain and they are encouraged. I think it is helpful to others simply to know that they ARE NOT ALONE in their suffering. Sometimes, especially with pain - whether physical or emotional - it’s easy to feel like you’re completely isolated from the rest of the world and everyone else goes around acting completely normal while you are suffering so badly. I used to tell Chris, my husband, when I was in severe pain, that I honestly couldn’t understand how people could just be walking around acting like things were normal and life was good. Even though I lived without pain before I got sick and I fully understand that you can’t FEEL someone else’s pain, I got to the point where it was so bad that I just didn’t understand how they couldn’t feel my pain. It’s almost like the pain was so severe that I expected it to flow out of me and others would feel it as well. I know that sounds silly, but when you have pain that is debilitating, it is so all-consuming that it’s all you can think about. I understand this.

If you need a sympathetic ear, e-mail me. It is NOT easy to homeschool when you live with chronic illness, but it CAN be done!

Yours truly,
Sonya Haskins

www.thehomeschooladvocate.com

After I found out that I had more blood clots in my abdomen last week, I wrote an e-mail to my editor. I had just received the news a few hours before and you can sense my frustration in the note. My editor said that it is obvious I’m upset, but that there are also parts of the e-mail that he thought might be encouraging to others who suffer with chronic pain or illness. I’m sharing part of the e-mail here in hopes that someone might benefit from this in some small way.

…………

I am still feeling awful. Â They are still running tests. Â I am probably going to go home tomorrow and be managed on an outpatient basis. Â They are relatively certain that this is a blood clotting issue, which is horrible. Â I had “numerous” new clots in my abdominal area and in the veins that go to my legs. Â This is why I’ve felt so much worse since September and particularly the past couple of weeks. Â This is VERY bad news. Â I was hoping it was NOT related to the clotting problem because this means that (a) it is not easily fixable, (b) it requires long term treatment with medicine that causes me migraines and other bad side effects, and (c) I am sicker than I’ve wanted to admit. Â

I did some research after I had Hannah and discovered that the average life expectancy after a major clotting episode like the one I had was about 7 years.  Hannah is almost 6.  I just REALLY didn’t want this to be related to my blood.  If the problems were pregnancy related, we could avoid future problems by not getting pregnant.  Now that I’ve had another non-pregnancy related episode, I think the doctors may be correct in assessing that I am going to have long term issues with this and it probably has substantially limited my life span - to put it quite bluntly.  I realize only God is in control of that issue, but there is only so much a body can take. I think if I hadn’t had pain medicine five years ago to alleviate some of the pain I was in, my body would have shut down then. It is astonishing how much pain blood clots cause.

So I am very depressed. Â I’m frustrated. Â I’m mad. Â I’m sad. Â I’m trying to deal with the pain and also all the emotional issues I’m dealing with. Â I want to live. Â I want to raise my children. Â I want to travel to Europe with my husband one day. Â I want to be a good friend and a great writer. Â There is so much more to write, to do, to see, to enjoy. Â I told you before that my life has been more full since I had Hannah just because I do LIVE like I’m dying. Â Perhaps God wanted to remind me to live like that again and perhaps others around me might appreciate their lives just a teeny bit more when they realize that it could all be taken away. Â People NEED to live fully while they can. Â It’s a waste not to do so.

….

I had to stop writing after that because the pain was bad and I needed to rest, as I do now as well. I’ll try to put another update on this later, but for now, I can say that I serve a mighty God and if I can glorify him in some way through this suffering, then I consider it a blessing that I’ve been allowed to do so. It is horrible and I don’t “like” it, but at the same time I am willing to be a part of God’s plan no matter what the cost. So little is asked of us and we are spoiled or possibly just complacent, but when something like this happens, we really have a choice - are we going to give glory to God, who is still the same today as He was last week before I found out that I still have the problems OR are we going to curse the creator and question why we’re sick. I have simply chosen the first option. God has allowed this to happen for a reason.

Sonya

www.thehomeschooladvocate.com

On our local homeschool digest (e-mail tree), we post all sorts of information of interest to homeschool families. One of my favorite bits of information is a list of weekly store ads. A local mom goes through all the store fliers for the week and forwards those to me, then I post them to the digest. I’ve had increasing problems with my digestive system all fall and a few weeks ago, I posted a note asking if anyone was aware of sales on citrus fruit, particularly grapefruit and oranges, that I would appreciate it if they would post this on the digest.

I received a few responses to my post, but then the next week I got to the point where I could barely eat anyway. Then, last week I was put in the hospital so eating wasn’t really an issue at all. Before I was discharged from the hospital, one of my best friends started arranging for people to bring meals to our house so that I wouldn’t have to cook when I came home.

Apparently several of the people remembered my request for citrus foods because when I came home from the hospital, my kitchen counter looked like a mini-produce market! I had apples, oranges, grapefruit, grapes, and bananas across the counter top. It was so wonderful! The casseroles that we’ve received have been absolutely delicious, but I haven’t been able to eat much of those. Chris and the children have greatly enjoyed them, though! Each evening since I’ve been home, I have eaten one or two grapefruits and / or an orange. For some reason it doesn’t fill me up like other food - because it’s mostly liquid, I guess - but it forces my digestive system to function. Yeah!

I was just sitting here thinking about how friendship is shown in so many forms and it can even be evident through a pile of produce.

Sonya
www.thehomeschooladvocate.com

While I was pregnant with our fifth child, I knew something was terribly wrong, but the doctors ignored me. They brushed it off, saying this was my fifth child in less than seven years and that I must just be tired of being pregnant. My husband and I believe children are a blessing from the Lord and I welcomed another baby. I was not tired of being pregnant and I knew something was wrong with my body. The labor and delivery were different from every other child I’d had and then immediately afterwards my blood pressure plummeted. Within a couple of days, I had developed a fever of 105.9 and I was deathly ill. My problems had just begun.Over the next few weeks, I went from bad to worse. The doctors discovered that the pain and pressure I had felt in my abdomen while I was pregnant with Hannah was in fact a mass of blood clots around my right ovarian and renal veins. The standard treatment is IV Heparin, but unfortunately I am incredibly allergic to this drug. Instead of dissolving my clots, it created a hyper-clot situation in my body and within another week, my blood was so thick that they couldn’t get the samples to the lab from my body before they were too thick to test. My doctors gave me a 30% chance of living and even if I lived, the outlook for my full recovery was grim.