Independence Lost, Appreciation Gained

This post is Part 2 in a series about my forced break from writing and a new vision for the future...

In March of 2021, I underwent what was then my 12th operation to repair a device I have been forced to use since birth since my body doesn't drain spinal fluid naturally off of my brain. During that procedure, known as a VP shunt revision, a second valve was added to supplement the function of the main valve in the system. Roughly two and a half years later, that valve would ultimately become the source of nearly a year of physical struggles and mental/emotional decline.

Just before the start of Labor Day Weekend 2022, I was on my way home from church one Thursday night when I suddenly started having tunnel vision and a bit of dizziness. I got home that night and wasn't ready to admit what was really going on, but still decided to go ahead and keep an eye on things and alert my family as to what was going on.

As the next couple of days went by, things began to get worse and it didn't take me long to see that something was wrong. I was supposed to be leading an outdoor photography Bible study starting that weekend, but since I knew I wasn't going to be up for it, I was forced to call that off, quickly making it very difficult to keep my issues quiet as I'd hoped to do. By the middle of the following week, I found myself in the emergency room, all but positive I was about to have another surgery.

That was when I learned something I hadn't been told about my last shunt revision. I was completely caught off guard when my neurosurgeon's nurse practitioner came into the room and asked me what the pressure was set at in the gravity valve. As it turned out, the new valve was adjustable—a fact I hadn't been told up until that point.

So, a pressure change was made and I was sent home. Initially, the adjustment worked and I was completely symptom-free for two days. By the following weekend, however, that all changed and I was feeling worse than ever.

With my vision blurring and random dizzy spells hitting me with no warning, I had no choice but to basically say goodbye to the already limited independence I had. I couldn't walk without stumbling around like a drunk and driving was out of the question. At that point, I knew something was seriously wrong and I was convinced I knew what it was.

As the days turned into weeks, I continued to try to convince my doctor that I needed real help and what had been done wasn't cutting it. At first, I didn't get much attention, at all, but I did end up going back and having multiple pressure adjustments done over a period of roughly six months to no avail.

Over the course of those first six months, my memory started to get worse and worse. I went from just occasionally forgetting things I'd been told or was going to do to forgetting whole days at a time. On top of that, the dizzy spells and vision issues became more severe and more frequent, leaving me almost completely dependent on the people around me.

I was no longer able to do my job as a leader of the tech team at church and was still struggling through it on occasion, but really wasn't very effective as a writer, either. For the first couple of months, I was still able to do just enough to keep my regular posting schedule here on this blog, but it wasn't long before I found myself having to resort to simply publishing excerpts from my book, Nothing Worth Doing Is Easy, since I wasn't able to formulate thoughts well enough to write anything of any substance and my reading comprehension was lacking, to put it mildly.

Eventually, I made the difficult but necessary decision to suspend my blog postings indefinitely while I put my focus squarely on finding a way to get the treatment I needed.

In April of this year, I was finally able to secure the first step toward that treatment when I was admitted to another hospital to have an intracranial pressure monitor placed in my head. Over the next roughly 36 hours, the pressure inside my skull was constantly monitored as a means of figuring out what was going on.

Sure enough, that test showed exactly what I thought it would and a few weeks after I was released from that hospital stay, I had a date for surgery. The problem was, that surgery wouldn't happen for another two months.

As the months dragged on throughout the whole saga, my mental health took what can only be described as a nosedive and I found myself battling immense frustration almost constantly, coupled with feelings of uselessness that made life even more difficult than it already was. When I did finally have the surgery I knew I needed for almost a year, those mental struggles nearly became yet another major hurdle in my effort to get back to my normal life.

You see, I have a history from when I was in my teens and early 20s of substance abuse. One of those substances was opioid painkillers, so I went into surgery knowing I could be in for another rough patch while recovering.

As it turned out, though, my recovery from surgery was nothing short of miraculous. Not only did I go home the same day I had surgery for the first time ever, but I didn't even miss a church service that week, despite our midweek service starting less than 34 hours after the surgery began.

I was back to normal life within a week and never even needed any pain medication beyond a single dose of Aleve I took one day when I had a lot of swelling. To make things even better, the prescription I was given after surgery was never sent to the pharmacy, so I didn't have the temptation I have very little doubt I wouldn't have resisted to take every pill I could get.

To the untrained eye, that probably looks like a simple coincidence brought on by human error, but I have no doubt in my mind it was God saving me from myself once again. As ashamed as I am to admit that I used to be that guy and as much as I wish my normal level of independence was greater than it is, both the struggles I endured for nearly a year and that lost prescription make me appreciate and praise God all the more, while simultaneously being immensely thankful for where I am now.

I'm back to healthy, back to writing and I plan to not only continue, but increase my mission to bring the Gospel message and a better understanding of biblical concepts to as many people as this platform allows.