Seventeen Stitches to the Sunshine State

At around 11:30 AM on Saturday morning, about 6 hours before I needed to be at the airport to catch a plane for a much needed week vacation in the Florida sun, I was washing dishes in the sink. This particular morning I was washing a rather large, glass salad bowl. As I turned the glass bowl over to wipe it dry, it slipped and fell into the drying rack, shattering into many large and small pieces. One such piece sliced directly into the palm of my left hand. As soon as I felt the sharp, stinging burn of the cut and saw the gaping wound in my left hand, I knew I was in trouble and immediately went to "The Bad Place." I grabbed paper towels and applied pressure without investigating it much further and immediately called for help. As I waited for my father and husband to come pick me up, I tried to distract myself from the pain by catching up on my fellow RA bloggers, just hoping that I wouldn't pass out alone in my apartment. 

An hour later I had arrived at the ER, was checked in and was waiting for the Physician Assistant to examine my injured hand. Every nurse and technician who entered, greeted me by saying "I heard you did a good job on your hand." Fortunately, like most things in life, it could have been a lot worse! Apparently, if you have to slice your hand, I picked the best spot to do it. I missed any arteries or tendons and was still able to move and feel all my fingers. Seventeen stitches and 10cc of lidocaine later, I was stitched up and discharged. With amazingly 3 hours to go before our plane for Florida departed.

My hand is by no means healed. The cut wraps around from the side of my hand to the bottom corner of my palm. It is black and blue all over and numb around the wound. Currently it looks like a shark took a bite out of my hand and that may be the story I tell to my forever curious pediatric patients when I can return to work. However, I was still able to make my flight to Florida and lying on a beach is nice place to build skin cells!

Adventures in Puppy Parenthood

This week started off like any other, lying in bed mentally and physically preparing for another week of work, wishing for one more day off, but then Sunday night our puppy got sick. The poor little guy got sick to his stomach 5 times before throwing up blood, prompting our panicked visit to the doggy ER at 6.00 AM. I'll spare you the gory details but basically after many tests, expensive vet bills and a week of sleepless nights, he
is on the mend. It was determined he may have a bacterial infection (probably from Dog Daycare) and was put on antibiotics.

However, being a first time pet owner, I was unprepared for how emotional this whole experience would be. We felt helpless being unable to determine what was wrong with him and what we needed to do to help him get better. He just stared at us with his puppy dog eyes and it broke our heart. We felt like we were over reacting taking him to the vet twice and calling them many more times, but immediately went to "the bad place" about what could happen if he was really, really sick. We were investigating his daily bathroom breaks like forensic investigators, looking for anything abnormal. It was an emotionally and physically exhausting week. I was beginning to worry about how we will ever survive the ups/downs up "baby parenthood," if "puppy parenthood" had us so thrown.

Sometimes I feel like a crazy person for loving my puppy like he's my child. I recently read a study from researchers at Mass General Hospital that woman really do love their dogs the same way they love babies.

In the study, researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital explored the neuroanatomical similarities between the human-pet bond and the maternal-child bond. To run the study, they had women look at photos of their own babies and dogs. They then looked at other dogs and babies that weren’t their own.

The researchers found that, “there was a common network of brain regions involved in emotion, reward, affiliation, visual processing and social cognition when mothers viewed images of both their child and dog.”

They also discovered that the animals they didn’t know didn’t trigger the same brain regions. They concluded that dog owners really do love their dogs like they’re their babies. (http://www.ryot.org/science-says-humans-love-dogs-like-their-babies/840873)

So maybe I'm not crazy. The reason this experience was so trying, was because that emotional connection could be real. His cute little puppy dog face makes it all worth it!

Hypochondriasis, a side effect of lifelong JRA or a result of "The Burden of Knowledge?"

JRA has many mysterious and overlapping symptoms. However, figuring out if your symptoms are related to your JRA, or just typical human being symptoms can be challenging. Having to decipher this puzzle of symptoms your entire life can lead you to become a hypochondriac.

I haven't always been a hypochondriac. I can imagine that my parents were pretty on top of any swollen joint, cough, cold, pain or symptom when I was child. When my knees were swollen we'd go see my doctor and usually determine my JRA was flaring and try a new medicine. When my eyes got blurry we would see my eye doctor and determine that my uveitis was flaring or during one scary weekend, determine my glaucoma was uncontrolled, leading to emergency eye surgery. When I was feverish and weak one day, I visited my PCP and learned that I had the flu. Recently I had SI joint pain, I thought it was from a fitness injury (that's what I get for getting in shape) but as it turns out there is inflammation around my SI joints, caused by who knows what. So you can see, typically in the past when I have had a gut feeling something was wrong, it usually was.

Compounding this precedence is my tendency to go to "the bad place," very quickly. I'm not sure if this is an Italian trait or just me being dramatic. But basically it works something like this... My puppy was lethargic and had a swollen stomach one night, and I went from thinking he had a stomach ache, to a bowel obstruction to a rare fatal dog disease called "Bloat" where their stomach twists in on itself. This happens frequently throughout my life; my husband doesn't answer his phone in an hour = he's been kidnapped or is passed out on the floor in a coma, I have stomach pain= I have an ulcer or appendicitis, I have an ingrown toe nail= my toe is going to get infected and cause total body sepsis. You get the point.

I was recently watching the T.V show Scrubs and it was an episode where the attending doctor, Dr. Cox (a very brash, frank, no BS kind of guy) had a baby and was over reacting about a cough. The pediatrician said to him that he has "The Burden of Knowledge," meaning he knows too much based on his profession and unless he "gets a handle on it" it will torture him. I feel like this is part of my problem. I have had too many personal experiences involving pain or illness leading to actual infection, inflammation or complication that I will forever be sticken with "The Burden of Knowledge."

However, I know I need to get a handle on this for the sake of any future children. With my developmental and clinical experiences as a pediatric occupational therapist, as well as my personal experiences with JRA, together with my husband's education as a nurse and nurse practitioner...our future children will stand no chance. Every developmental milestone they don't reach on time, or symptom that could result in a myriad of illness, I will go to "the bad place." So how do you rid your memory of a life of symptoms and years of studying and clinical experiences? I am not sure, but I am going to try to find out how...