July 28, 2008

• Never Give Up

  My 72 year old mother-in-law has destroyed my preconceptions about aging. She has struggled with her weight and severe anxiety since age 32. Her cholesterol levels, for the past 15 years, have held steady at an astonishing 1500. That is not a typo, and I have the documentation (and shocked doctors) to prove it. This is a woman who would cry at the drop of a hat and get sick to her stomach with nerves at the thought of going out of the house for even a little while to do something as simple as grocery shopping. Sweet, caring, but severely unstable. Last year we began exploring options for in-home care or a retirement / assisted living facility to put her in because she couldn’t remember which way was up. Add to this a severe case of Fibromyalgia (if you don’t believe this disease exists, you probably have never met anyone that had a very bad case of it. It is NOT subtle), and dangerously severe depressions to top it all off. Absolutely awful way to go through life.

  But she never gave up.

  In my uneducated opinion the root cause of just about all her problems has been chronic anxiety. I believe it has been taxing her body and brain to the breaking point. Every medication they gave her for anxiety actually made it worse. Imagine Xanax instilling paranoid delusions and amping you up out of your mind. Imagine Klonipin giving you nightmares, causing insomnia, and making you feel like you just drank six cups of coffee. Imagine Ativan causing Restless Leg Syndrome…a drug which I understand is sometimes prescribed to treat that very condition. Imagine a host of other meds, each taking 6 weeks to run their course, and all of them hitting you with every adverse reaction in the book. Sometimes even resulting in hospitalization. Imagine that by this point your nerves are so fried that you cannot even watch the news without practically having a heart attack. I am not joking. Severe anxiety of this magnitude is not humorous in the least. It is devastating to watch someone you love suffer with this.

  Now imagine that on top of all this, you have a son who is a heroine addict, who shows up at your door, guilting you into letting him stay with you, only to have all the chaos that goes with it enter into your house so that your other Son and son-in-law (that would be me) have to intervene and put him on a bus back from whence he came…with a firm word about not returning in the same manner ever again.

  But she never gave up. She continued to make dietary changes, continued to pursue a relationship with Christ, continued to demand that her doctor not give up too. This from a woman who required me or my wife to call the doctor for her because she was too nervous to ask him to try another medication.

  Her dietary changes were the first thing to bring her dramatic results. At 68 years old, she was 200lbs. Today at 72 she is 130lbs and highly mobile. Her Fibromyalgia was so severe she could barely walk. Now she works in her garden and takes her dog for walks. But it gets better.

  Her cholesterol dropped from 1500, to 930, and is now down to the low 400′s. All this she did while still suffering from horrendous anxiety attacks and adverse psychological reactions to the psych meds they kept trying on her. Amazing. Small and frail my arse! This woman comes from what we in America know as “The Greatest Generation”. Sweet as pie, tough as nails. Rare by any standard, but a paradox to be sure. Crying from anxiety, but refusing to give into it is something I cannot imagine. It sounds like the ultimate head game to me. A mirror within a mirror…

  One day my wife is doing some research on the internet and comes across a drug called Emsam (www.emsam.com). It belongs to a class of drugs known as MAOI inhibitors and for this reason her doctors were reluctant to try it. There are a lot of foods that are incompatible with this drug, and by this I mean really really bad reactions can occur. However, she had made a science out of modifying her diet and understanding nutrition over the past 4 years. She insisted she could take it and be OK. She wanted to try it, and why not? Nothing else was working.  Her memory was still poor, her anxiety still severe, and we weren’t so sure this was a good idea after all. Like a lot of our honorable seniors, she had a pharmacy above her fridge and a lot of those meds were also incompatible with Emsam (and of course some with each other as well). My mother-in-law became near hysterical at the thought of discarding these drugs, even though they could potentially kill her if she took them with Emsam. So my wife marked all the bottles with a huge red magic marker X, stuck them a plastic bag, taped it shut and put them in a drawer with a note that said “If you think you need something in this bag, you must call me first and here is my phone number…”

  It worked. She began taking Emsam about 8 months ago. Today she is not only anxiety free, she is happy. We are stunned.

  Last week she even had a group of people over to her house so she could begin giving a course on nutrition!  She continues her life of dedicated Christian worship, and credits God for giving her the strength to continue and the insight to turn her energy on better nutrition. Her memory is clear, she is vitally alive, and she is at peace with herself and those around her. She is the healthiest I have ever seen her, and I have known her for 17 years. Whether you believe God had a hand in this or not, the fact is she never gave up in face of mental instability and physical challenges. Her Fibromyalgia is now only a minor irritant to her. Unreal.

  Never Give Up.

  • 7:55 pm
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