John McCain’s diagnosis has me thinking again about the symptoms that I experienced prior to my own diagnosis and how nobody thought “brain tumor!” at all during that year of weird stuff happening to me. His diagnosis puts his wacky James Comey line of questioning into perspective now, don’t you think? His brain may not have been his normal brain that day at all…

Over the course of almost a year, I experienced some odd things that I just didn’t know how to interpret. Now, of course, I know that my “interpretation” skills were off because my brain was off…but to give you an idea, here are some things that I was dealing with:

• I had plantar fasciitis that moved from my right foot to my left foot and then turned into a weird restless leg syndrome kind of feeling (all of this has completely disappeared since my surgery)
• I had weeks long periods of insomnia and loss of appetite for the first time in my entire life.
• I had these weird hot flash things that I attributed to my diet in some way
• I lost my parallel parking skills completely and even had trouble pulling into normal parking spots head on, sometimes having to correct myself up to 3 times
• I had a couple hallucinatory experiences that I attributed to something I ate or drank.
• I could no longer watch TV or movies that I had in the past; I would watch 10-15 minutes and just not be interested. The only things I could watch were Hallmark movies. I thought I was just getting soft in my old age.

There  are probably other things, but as you can see, these are just odd things that don’t make much sense and that I certainly didn’t even relate to each other. I went to multiple doctors, one at a holistic women’s center that did blood work and even a stomach culture and everything came back fairly normal. Dehydration. Low vitamin D. But nothing that directed them to consider sending me for an MRI.  I have actually forwarded my medical records back to those doctors in hopes that they can learn from what they didn’t catch with me. One can hope.

Recent events certainly have me thinking more about health and how things are connected within our bodies and how we know when something is off, even if we don’t know why it is off. Listen to your body. Take care of it the best you can. I certainly plan to.

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