LogFAQs > #980015431

Just need to vent a bit. Feel free to ignore ;p
So 5 years ago I was diagnosed with cancer. A super rare form called Birkitt's Lymphoma. Highly aggressive, very dangerous. Luckily they caught it at stage one and the trials for the treatment plan they used on me showed 100% cure rate for people at stage one. Not that they had a ton of data for said trials due to it being so aggressive that it's almost never caught at that stage. Everything is good on that though. Did my 4 rounds of treatment and have been all good since, at least on that front.

Last year in February I woke up one morning and had no strength in my left arm and it was tingling. Also couldn't hardly turn my head or look down. The pain was excruciating. After 3 weeks I eventually got an MRI and it turned out I had herniated discs c5, c6, and c7. They were bulging bad enough that they were pushing on the nerve whose path runs down the left arm. Eventually had surgery to fix it but it was an awful time period. I couldn't sleep, couldn't do anything really because of the lack of strength in my left arm. It's all good now for the most part but my strength hasn't fully recovered for reasons I'll detail below.

About a year after I finished chemo I was doing pull-ups in my basement, I have a very rudimentary gym/dojo down there, and felt an awful pulling pain in both elbows. That's never gone away. I've been getting cortisone injections and done multiple cycles of physical therapy, they all help for a bit though the pain never fully goes away. It also just continues to get worse over time. At this point I can't fully extend either arm without it being in pain. In the mornings it's especially bad. It's been diagnosed as a type of particularly awful tennis elbow, essentially the tendons there are covered in scar tissue and micro tears. I'm going to get surgery on left May 2nd and the right on May 20th (long enough for the left to be out of a brace).

I bring this up because today I had to take out a home equity loan (which sucks because my house is about 3 years away from being paid off) to put a new deck on my house for 40k. The old one was built with lumber that wasn't treated properly at the mill and is literally rotting apart. We got 810 dollars (which was the cost of the lumber at the time) from the class action lawsuit related to it. The amount of money I have spent on healthcare in the last 5 years, plus the 9th months of lost work, would have covered that 40k and then some. It's just super goddamn frustrating because it feels like I cannot get ahead. I get that I'm still better off that 90% of the people out there in that I own a home that is almost paid off and neither my wife nor I carry any student loan debt (she went on a scholarship and I didn't go to college). Plus the house is going to need a new HVAC system soon, a new roof in 4 or 5 years, and new floors. Originally the plan was to take care of all of that once the house is paid off, but now with the extra loan that's going to be even longer, which means we'll having to take more home equity loans to do that stuff when it finally has to be done.

It just feels sort of crushing to know that if my goddamn body wasn't falling apart by the age of 42 that I wouldn't be in this spot. Like I said, I know it could absolutely be worse, it's just frustrating and now CE has to listen to it ;p Thanks for listening.

/blogfaqs