Wow! What a couple of months this has been! I wrote a post called Getting Off The Boat Soon back in October. I was talking about the "diagnosis" that I got for the vertigo I've had all year. The doctor wanted to put me on a certain medication that he told me I'd have to take for the rest of my life in order to control constant retaining of fluid. He also wanted to give me a steroid shot directly into my ear canal. Yeah, I wasn't thrilled about either one of those instructions. But, more than that, I didn't feel right about it. God gives us someone called The Holy Spirit to guide us and give us those "feelings" that something just doesn't seem quite right. God also gave us a "gut feeling" and common sense.
Here we are, almost five months later, and I now know the real reason for this vertigo. It is not the original diagnosis. I had a root canal about six years ago, right before I found out that I was pregnant with Sarah. I went to an Endodontist but, unfortunately, she didn't have the same equipment that they do now. She did the best she could with what she had, but it turns out that I have a fourth canal in my tooth that she wasn't able to see on the x-ray. So, she cleaned the other three canals and sealed up my tooth. I was supposed to go and have a crown put on the tooth, but once I knew I was pregnant, she wanted to wait until after I had the baby to do any further dental work. She had put in a temporary filling and said it would be fine as long as I didn't eat anything super sticky with that tooth. Great! No worries! However, no one could have prepared me for what happened in the 26th week of my pregnancy.
I got a call on November 14th, 2006 from Josh at about 6am. He had just been informed by his Dad that his younger brother, Aaron, had been killed instantly in a car accident in the middle of the night. Our family is very close, so this was devastating news for us. We flew to California that afternoon with Hailey, who was about 2 1/2 at the time, and walked into a situation we were not prepared to deal with. The following morning, the pastor was at my in-law's house and we were going over funeral arrangements. Josh and I had to handle a lot of the details because his parents simply couldn't. Josh's Aunt was in the kitchen talking to his other Aunt, who was on her way from Maryland to be with us. She had a layover in Chicago and had checked her messages. She had a message from Josh's Uncle that their son, Josh's cousin, had been shot and killed in Iraq the day before. At the time, all we heard come from the kitchen was the sound of Josh's Aunt saying, "Oh my God, no!" We all went running in to see what was wrong and she told us the news. It was too much.
I grabbed my cell phone and ran out of the house and down the street to the cul-de-sac. I tried calling my sisters, but they didn't answer. My parents were in Cabo San Lucas and I couldn't reach them. So, I called my pastor's wife and told her what was going on. It was so much grief, and so awful. I started having contractions that night and my Doctor told me that I had to calm down and rest as much as possible. Well, that really wasn't possible. We had Hailey with us, we had details we had to attend to. Details that no brother and sister-in-law should ever have to do, but we had to.
I know that I'm going the long way around in getting to the point of how this relates to this vertigo, but please bear with me. I ended up getting hold of my parents and they, being the amazingly awesome parents they are, cut their vacation short and flew to California to help us with Hailey, and to be a support and a strength for us. I have never been more grateful to them in my entire life. We got through the funeral, barely, and began the next couple days before it was to be Thanksgiving. We already had planned to be there for the holiday and would have been there to see Aaron in just three short days...God had other plans.
While we were dealing with all of this, back home, our house was being prepared for a major addition/renovation. We got a call from our contractor that the hole they had dug had flooded and that they had to pump it out, which ended up costing us more money of course. Many other things were not going as planned, and the stress of everything finally consumed my pregnant body. By the time we got home, the pain in my feet had begun again. I had been doing really well up until the day of the phone call. Hailey started waking up, I kid you not, over ten times a night and continued to do so for over two years. There were contractors in our house at all times, sawing, nailing, pounding, etc. for months. I ended up getting a wheelchair at home about six weeks after we got home from California. I couldn't walk for eight months. I couldn't stand up for more than a minute. The pain in my legs and feet was so bad, and my contractions never stopped, so I was put on bed rest. I had to be anyway because of the pain. We had to hire a nanny to take care of Hailey and I because I couldn't even cook meals for us. It was all I could do to just get into my wheelchair and wheel myself into the kitchen to answer questions for the contractors. Finally, I ended up just having them come into my room to talk to me. I was so embarrassed.
The pressure of the baby was really adding to the pain in my legs, so my Doctor allowed me to come in for an amniocentesis. On Valentine's Day, I got the news that Sarah's lungs weren't quite ready yet. I sank further into despair. I really thought that I was going to get to have her that day. The doctor said that she was going to wait and see if the fluid changed and that she would call me if it did. I got the call I had been waiting for on February 16th. I was to go to the hospital at 3:00 that afternoon to have my baby girl. I was so excited and so scared at the same time. Riding in the car was absolute torture for me, but I had to do it.
I had a c-section and delivered a beautiful, healthy Sarah Ashlyn Markley. I thought for sure that once she was born, the pressure would be relieved and the pain in my legs and feet would go away again. I was wrong. I was in even more pain due to even more lack of sleep. Now, on top of Hailey waking up every 30-45 min. throughout the night, Sarah was waking up to be fed and changed several times as well. So, our nanny stayed on with us for the next several months and the stress of that financial burden, on top of the addition to our house, just made things worse. Don't get me wrong, she was amazing! And we needed her. But, everything that had happened in those six months was just too much to handle. Our marriage was pretty rocky, our tempers were hot from being so exhausted, and I asked God every day, "Why is this happening to us? Why is this pain happening to me?" It didn't really do any good to be angry with God, but I was. And I was becoming resentful towards Hailey for something she really had no control over. We found out about a year after things settled down and I was out of my wheelchair again that she has something called Sensory Integration Processing Disorder. I won't explain what that is, but it explained everything that she had been going through for over two years. A couple more years later, we found out that she was allergic to wheat and cow's milk. I vowed that I would never be resentful toward my children again, and that if something was going on with them, that I would investigate and not give up until we found it. There is much more to my story regarding this time frame of life, but I will save it until later.
I've said all this to say...I never went back to get my tooth fixed. As you can tell, I was a little pre-occupied. We ended up moving to Virginia when Sarah was about 18 months old. A few months after we got here, my tooth really began to bother me. I found an awesome dentist and he x-rayed my tooth, found it was infected, put me on an antibiotic, and when it was healed, filled it and put a crown on it. That was two years ago. I forgot about it, thinking everything was fine. Then, a couple months ago, I started having numbing sensations in my jaw. When I would put my face lotion on, pain would shoot down my neck from my jaw line. So, back to the dentist I went. He x-rayed it and compared it with the x-ray from two years ago. It was worse. So, he sent me to an awesome endodontist about a month ago who uses a microscope to do his work. He discovered the fourth canal and said it looked like a petri dish. The infection in my jaw is so bad that a large portion of my jawbone isn't even there anymore. It will take about a year for it to regenerate the bone and for the infection to completely heal. He said that I've been fighting this silent infection since the original root canal, six years ago. Finally, it had gotten so bad around this time last year, that the pressure and inflammation from the infection began putting pressure on the nerves that run up into my ear and also to the base of my neck, thus creating the vertigo.
I am happy to report that the vertigo is about 75% gone! Praise the Lord! Who would have ever guessed that all of this horrible dizziness, nausea, headaches, body-aches, etc. would be caused from an infection in my tooth? So, the moral of this story is..."GO TO THE DENTIST!!!" Haha! But seriously, I have been learning more and more about the scary things that can happen to your body because of dental issues that go unsolved. You would think that I would have felt more pain before now, but the pain I deal with in my legs and feet is so much worse that I think I just didn't notice it as much. Not to mention what I've been going through with my stomach and having Celiac disease. I'm sure part of the vertigo is related to that as well, but the majority was my tooth. How crazy is that? And how awesome is it that getting my tooth fixed almost immediately solved the problem?! Wanna know what I asked God after I left the dentist? "Why on earth didn't you tell me this sooner??" Hey, I'm not perfect. But this time, I wasn't angry with God. I was thankful. I praised Him for revealing this to me and I praise Him for all that I have learned by going through this journey. I don't need to know why it took so long for this to come about. All I know is that God loves me and he's been with me every step of this year. Actually, every step of my life.
So, I know that I went the long way around in getting to the reason for this vertigo. And you probably really didn't need to know everything in between. But, I pray that it blesses you in some way. That's the only reason why I share my story with you, honestly and openly. I share it with the hope that it will encourage someone. That you would know that God loves you beyond what you could ever imagine...even if it doesn't feel like it. Even when you walk through the valley of the shadow of death. Even if you are ill for years. He cares about you. He had a purpose for your life. And he will use anything you have gone through for His glory. Anything.
I should have more test results concerning my stomach/pain issues in the next week or so. They have determined that there is a problem, and that my body is creating antibodies in my blood that are attacking the tissue in my body. The next test should tell them what is causing this to happen. Thank you to all who have been praying for me. I can feel the prayers and they mean more than you'll ever know. May God bless you this week.
Love, Tracie
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