Life is love and each day one at a time and wonder and joy and pain. For three years I was half-alive, consolidating my energy for work, resting at home, wishing the kids well as they went to their concerts and things I didn’t have strength to attend, half enjoying the things I could attend. This was a blessing…at the time.
Many people have it a lot worse. Chronic illness, chronic fatigue, terrible accidents, metastatic cancer, all the sudden your life is so different than what you knew. When you are a doctor you understand this is how life works. Nothing was stolen. Everything we have to live and love and enjoy without these burdens is a gift.
When I was an intern and driving to my job on the medical floors and the ICU at a hospital in Dorchester I wished I could get in a car accident to get a rest for at least a few days. I never had an accident. I never missed a day of work. I played this song from U2 over and over on my drive in to work every day for months.
So much time later I was sick for three years, but then I felt well, and I started this substack I think to explain everything, to me and to everyone. I felt so different, I thought I was cured, but I couldn’t be sure. In the first year of my illness there were many months of feeling good before I got sick again. In March of 2023 I caught a horrible cold from one of my beautiful teen virus incubators, and I had a fever again. So I wasn’t sure if I knew the cause of my problems or not, maybe I was wrong and I had to start all over. One more thing to blog about! Content is king.
But this new fever came with a cough and sore throat and muscle aches and all illness stuff I hadn’t experienced since before the pandemic. My ongoing troubles were different in just how few symptoms I had. At the end of 2019 I began to have low grade fevers and fatigue that lasted for weeks or months, then remitted, then recurred. That’s it. Fevers from 99 to 101, days and weeks at a time. Sometimes I got the morning off, sometimes it was all day long. At night the fever might break, waking me and leaving sweats and chills. There were no other symptoms. No rashes, no nausea, no GI troubles, no headaches. The timing had nothing to do with my periods or my sleep or stress or what I ate. Just fever and a need to curl up in bed and just rest.
A couple years into it I decided to get an unexplained fever work-up, because this sort of symptom could mean an autoimmune disease, chronic infection, or cancer. The gold star work-up with several expert Harvard doctors revealed nothing. While I wish I had an answer, in this case, no news is good news, no cancer or an autoimmune disease requiring steroids or some other med is good, after all. And of course I’d spoken with my doctor friends, running through a differential diagnosis, and my other more alternative medicine friends, who knew better than to recommend some weird supplements or rectal ozone or whatever. I’d been thinking of this with my doctor buddies too but my friend Diana asked about anything I’d had operated on or was indwelling, like root canals.
As it happens I do have one root canal, from a traumatic break of my front tooth, but it’s been there untouched for 30 years, and never caused me trouble. The only other indwelling thing I had was my IUD, put there a few years after my second kid was born. I loved the IUD. It was hormone-free, copper. No sexual side effects, no weight gain, no remembering to take a stupid pill every day. It was effortless and prevented a great deal of hassle. In September 2022 it was time to take it out after 10 years of good work. I had been fever free for a couple months and was feeling energetic and nearly back to normal (after so many years of recurrent fevers it took longer and longer to recover after each acute episode).
Look on and Cry: Crooked Still
I mentioned the fevers to my Ob/Gyn in my yearly well visit. She was interested, of course, but didn’t have any answers for me, and she was pleased I’d consulted the fever experts at Harvard. (She even mentioned it in her note, which I can now read due to new laws. I’ve always trained my medical students and psych residents to write notes so that the patients and their lawyers would read them…I hope they appreciate that advice now). I asked her if we could remove the IUD during the usual appointment, and the timing was right, and out it came, with no complications or trouble.
She removed the IUD on September 1, 2022, when I was fever-free. The fever came back that afternoon and persisted for four months, every single day, the longest stint ever.
Then, as the year turned from 2022 to 2023, the fever went away, and never came back.
I quit my old job in July 2022 and went back to work 3 half days a week so I could have enough energy to give to my patients and paperwork and have plenty of time to rest. The transition took a lot of time and effort, but by the end of 2022 I was settled and taking advantage of the reduced schedule. I assumed after two and a half years and no answer from the fever clinic that I would be stuck with the fevers and symptoms and the reduced work schedule forever.
Don’t You Forget About Me: Simple Minds
But now I’m fine. I have energy. I can drive the kids after school and go to the long distance competitions. A year ago I had to conserve my strength for a piano recital and now I can plan the snacks.
I am almost a year into my reduced schedule and it’s still fantastic.
This is all much more fun when I feel well.
Thanks to you I now have "rectal ozone" in my Google search history.
This one delivered, happiness! I love this for you. May you be blessed with continued health, fun and fantasticness!