Vitamin D is making the rounds on the news reels. Even Oprah is talking about not getting enough of the stuff that helps bones and muscle tissue. And for some reason (obviously the fact that I’m living under a sock puppet or inside the heel part of it at least) I had no idea that Vitamin D was a big deal.
And I don’t eat dairy except for the occasional blob of cheese on a pizza at a buddy’s house or at my apartment when I have said buddies in.
And I largely work inside.
And heck, after work, I usually stay inside.
And all that inside “action” is in Canada. Which for some reason -Northerly climate?-counts.
So, these back “facts” lead me to tell you about The Almost Diagnosis.
Because I’m easy to scare and influence with even the mere suggestion of a horror movie having me fearing ghosts, vampires, zombies, small children and abandoned rural gas stations for weeks, I want to start this blog post off as reasonable, rational, equating my “Almost Diagnosis” to lacking Vitamin D, which is likely, but here’s the story:
I have a cousin who was diagnosed with cervical cancer very late and has gone through heck xs hell xs what’s worse than heck +hell? and back again. She’s pretty amazing and tougher than I could imagine myself being. She sent me a card, writing beseechingly, to go get a pap test. Now it goes without saying that these tests aren’t pleasant and although I’m more a rule follower than Dwight Shrute, I sometimes let 2 years slide between each test rather than one. But on the day I read my cousin’s card, I picked up my cell phone- day time minutes be damned- and called for an appointment.
So, when I got a call just a few days ago to go over test results, I almost shat the bed. My cousin is only 29 and we’re in the same age box on most online surveys for which Twlight character you’d be. And it’s true, recently I have been feeling really tired. Just wiped from the smallest of tasks that a few months earlier would have been as easy as peeling the foil off a chocolate and popping it into my mouth. And my fingers really hurt, and one of my wrists and my knees are more stiff than a set of 20th century starched shirt collars. I hadn’t been paying much attention to these things though, chalking them up to typing too much, not enough sleep or a side effect of learning to run. But once I got the phone call to come in to go over some tests, these “facts/symptoms” started piling up and chanting “cancer, cancer” on a dark stage in my mind. A whole chorus of “C” words.
I felt caught. Like a fish in a grate. Before the call I was swimming in a great big school of healthy free fish and then wait a second, I didn’t even know there was a grate, hey, why didn’t I see these bars before? -pinch- uh-oh, I’m stuck. I started wondering about all the people on an unseeming Monday or Tuesday afternoon that find out they have cancer. Maybe their car just broke down or the bus has been overpacked and fare increases are being threatened. Maybe their boyfriend’s dumped them. Maybe they had the same short story turned away, again. It doesn’t matter to the disease the other stuff that may be crowding out the salad on your plate. It is just one of those things that is. And I really thought that about for longer than I usually think about it, which is probably about 5 minutes a year.
I thought about disease. And I started to really notice the magnolias blooming in my neighbourhood. And I thought, why haven’t I noticed those before?
I walked to the doctor’s office almost late, trying to keep denial wrapped around my shoulders and pretend I was running an errand I considered fun, like picking out Thank you cards and shampoo in the aisles of a Shopper’s Drug Mart. I didn’t look at the trees or flowers or at people’s faces when I passed them on the sidewalk. Upon entering the clinic a man who was homeless was begging for cash. He came in the door with me and stood in the foyer. I had no cash but a one-zone bus ticket. He said that was useless to him. I asked him to take it so I wouldn’t feel so bad. He sighed and took the ticket. I rolled my shoulders back, turned around and walked into my doctor’s office. See? Life wasn’t so bad, right? The waiting room was packed but two minutes after sitting down I got called in right away. I could feel the stares on my back from the people who had been reading the same magazine article for half hour plus. Then I thought, Oh, god, maybe I’m sick. And I wanted to trade places with them. I could read about Harper’s Government in Maclean’s and wait another hour, no problem.
My doctor got to the point.
Turns out my pap test was absolutely 100% clear. I felt like the grate I was stuck in went back to being invisible and I could swim free to the surface again, I inhaled deeply. But wait a second, I still feel pretty badly… and then the light glinting off the water’s surface goes momentarily under cloud cover…
‘There is something,’ my amazing doctor says. ‘Well, it could be something, it could be nothing.’
My vitamin D is low.
Well, alrightee, then, thank you very much, I’ll go get some supplements and lay naked in the sun, no biggie right? I started to gather my things. There was a time in my life when Iron and B12 were really low too, a few dietary changes and horsepill-er-multi-vitamins later and I was good to go.
‘But,’ she continued, ‘Rheumatoid Arthritis came back. It’s inconclusive.’
The aches in my fingers, wrists, hips, knees, the constant low level throb, the fatigue, feeling bad, can’t that just be vitamin D? A little soy milk with my rum, right?
Well, I’ll find out. We’ll test again in two months.
It’s pretty harrowing all the stats on arthritis. That’s why we’re fundraising for the Arthritis Society (hello, wouldn’t that be the biggest crappiest irony of 2010 that while fundraising on behalf of family members I get the damn thing myself, gone will be my You’re So Brave speeches and born will be my, Jesus Christ, get me a painkiller and someone change the next episode of the Office, Michael Scott is the only one who gets it. Remember the episode where he burns his foot on his George Foreman grill? Exactly).
But it’s not for certain. It could just be Vitamin D, I’m in a zone that wavers between having it and not having, a gray shade. I do ache but not all the time. And it’s not for certain. Not that anything is. Well one thing is for certain: those magnolias blooming on peoples’ front lawns sure are beautiful.
Something different happened too, yeah, I noticed magnolias but I also noticed how I hunch my shoulders forward when I walk as though that will increase my speed. I noticed that I spend so much of my time walking around worrying about shit that doesn’t happen that when something real does come down the tube, I’m dumbstruck. At a loss to see how good I had it my entire life up to just moments before. But I don’t think that way on a daily basis as I’m swimming along with thousands of other fishes all grasping at finding something: happiness, money, a friend who finds the dismembered arm scene in Jurassic Park just as hilarious as I do.
I have 2 months to get my vitamin D back up and then we’ll test again for the arthritis. Maybe it’s “just” a vitamin D deficiency and a very generous warning to take better care of myself. Maybe it’s more.
