Trusting in God When Life Falls Apart | Part 1
It has been a number of months since I have had the opportunity to write in my blog. I wanted to share a little bit about what has happened since I last wrote.
I have been recovering from a spinal cord injury that occurred in August of last year. Long story, so I won’t share it now, but it affected my upper cervical spine. This injury was probably the most frightening and severely trying experience I have ever experienced. It was also very isolating, because it was an invisible injury and very few people knew how severely I was injured. I was able to get my health back and continue to work, however, it has taken me a good year to be able to feel just almost normal again.
During this time, I was also under treatment for very severe TMJ due to very bad orthodontia. The spinal cord injury made me extremely sensitive to my TMJ issue and I actually depended on my splint to give my body the stability so that I could do simple things like walk and stand. My current splint was not working out for me and I was developing issues like facial and generalized muscular weakness.
In early January I met a TMJ specialist in California (while visiting my parents) who gave me a new splint. The new splint worked very well and appeared to improve my symptoms. So I was expecting more improvement when I went to visit him in late January, when I got the splint adjusted (you have to adjust as your body adjusts to the splint).
When I returned home from this adjustment, I noticed that there were areas of skin around my lips and chin that looked like eczema. They didn’t itch and initially they were not even painful. They were just areas that wouldn’t heal.
I’ve always been able to get a handle on my skin so I wasn’t too concerned. But as the days turned into weeks, the skin just got worse. I began having more areas of unusual skin. There were parts around my lips that were rough, and wouldn’t heal. There were painful itchy bumps over my neck and there were almost infected areas around my cheeks.
Due to the timing of my symptoms, I felt that my bite (hence the splint in my mouth) was contributing to the inflammation in my skin but I didn’t know how to make sense of it. I told my dentist that the problem had started with my adjustment and I believed that if I got my bite right, the skin would improve. But my TMJ specialist was in California and it was difficult to get to my appointments, since I had to fly there from Portland. Initially, the difficulty was due to my work schedule. But then COVID happened in March and with all the restrictions, it was even more difficult to fly. I felt guilty for getting on a plane to get my teeth fixed.
So things got progressively worse over time.
In December, after suffering a setback to my spinal cord injury after lifting my heavy bags when traveling, I began developing itchy plaques over my neck and scalp. I thought it was psoriasis, perhaps. They went away in early January with the first splint, but after the adjustment, they got worse. This wasn’t psoriasis.
Initially, I just put on make up and continued trying to live a normal life, but as the months progressed and as the flares became more severe and painful, it was impossible and too painful to cover anything up with makeup. I realized that I needed help. In April, I decided that despite the Covid warnings that I needed to go see the dentist and fix the problem. So I stayed with my parents for about a week while I got treatment.
My parents were afraid of having me stay with them due to Covid. I was hesitant to stay with my parents in California too but for other reasons. One major reason was that that I had a little bit of an electromagnetic field (EMF) sensitivity that was developing and my parents lived within a mile of a cell tower. I had stayed with them when the problem initially started and I wondered if it had contributed.
For those of you who don’t know what EMF sensitivity is, it is a sensitivity to electromagnetic fields. I had heard about it, but never dreamed that I would have problems with it. For me it started very subtly, when my fingers would burn with pain whenever I used my cell phone or laptop. When I moved to my new home in the country, the reception is not great and the radiation there is pretty high. I was on my cell phone a lot and I would actually feel the skin of my face burning with it.
When I went to my parent’s home, I had an experience that made me realize how severely the cell phone was affecting me. I was resting—while using my cell phone of course—and my left arm (which I use to hold my cell phone) suddenly swelled up and became hard and painful. The skin became rough and dusky and my arm actually throbbed due to the increase in pressure. When I would press down on the skin, it would pit and take a while for the pit to go away. I realized at my parent’s home that I could not use my cell phone for any significant length of time.
I went to see the dentist a few times during the week. The first adjustment seemed to improve things and my skin looked noticeably better.
When I went back for further adjusting, within hours the skin flared up again. My dentist of course was very skeptical that the adjustments had anything to do with anything and I was left to try to figure out what I should do.
The lesions on my neck and face caused so much inflammation that it was causing circulatory issue. My face and head radiated heat and my hands and feet (normally cold) were so cold that no amount of socks or blankets could warm them up, even at night when I slept.
I began developing severe urticaria that was unbearable with heat and would flare when I would take a shower. I had difficulty washing my hair because new lesions would form. Not just on my head and neck, I began developing itchy red lesions over my trunk and my mucous membranes. I was itching all over, but to itch would cause severe pain and cause me to develop lesions in other areas of my body. I felt like Job…
