A Kubler-Ross moment with myself

Do you remember the song “Dem Bones?”

It is an old spiritual allegedly used to teach children basic anatomy even though the song is anatomically incorrect, all according to Wikipedia. Though there is no doubt of the connection between the song and the verse from “Ezekiel 37:1-14” where the profit pays a visit to the Valley of Dry Bones and through God’s command causes the bones to come alive.

Anatomically correct or not, the song in its simple way speaks to the connection and oneness of the human body. The body is such an intricate mechanism, like in many ways a fine automobile or space ship or aircraft. Often when one part of the body has a problem it can cause a glitch in another location that even sometimes seems silly to the mind not trained in at least a bit of gross anatomy.

Physicians are trained in more than a bit of gross anatomy and they know, or should know, much more than the rest of the population of these intricate interrelationships within the body which can cause something somewhere to go wrong and make a body miserable elsewhere.

I known my physicians, who work for the Department of Veterans Affairs, know all that. However, I don’t know if they are too hurried or harried or caught up in some kind of mindset that so often find themselves unable to see the forest of the body for the tree trunks.

 As I mentioned here last week after my MRI at the Houston VA, three different possible causes emerged for the painful peripheral neuropathy I have suffered in my feet and legs since the summer. One reason is Type II diabetes, which was promptly diagnosed after a lot of talk about it. Another reason was a type of fatty tissue causing stenosis of my lumbar spine and the other reason being an untreatable and possibly debilitating inflammation of one of the spine’s membranes.

So which condition does my specialist pick on which to focus? Why diabetes, of course. And I’ll be brutally frank, if the VA wants me to be treated for diabetes, they sure are picking a funny way to do it. Here is this glucometer and an instruction book. Good luck with your diabetes. Oh, we will fit you with some special shoes, but we can’t mail them to you. You’ll have to come back to Houston for them. No instruction on the diet and lifestyle that is needed to lose weight and pills to help combat the high blood sugar levels. That is the VA’s other answer for all that ails you: meds.

I find myself in a vicious medical circle in which none of my medical professionals have seemed to figure a way out for me. I ballooned in weight. My blood sugar went up at a marginal rate. I developed peripheral neuropathy — a condition very often caused by diabetes but also caused by perhaps more than 100 other reasons as well — the pain cut down on my walking for exercise to almost nothing. My weight ballooned even more. My blood sugar got higher. In the meantime, a MRI finds other problems not related to diabetes that are causing similar symptoms which include neuropathy. I also suffer from often severe back pain as well as shooting pain in my hip and leg. Oh, and let’s not forget that I developed a hand tremor two years ago. Just a coincidence I guess, huh?

So my specialist in Houston says lose weight and lower your blood sugar. We’ll attack the diabetes. Why? Well, my weight and blood sugar both needs to decrease. But also, diabetes is the easier, or perhaps, the only one of the three that can be treated. Good luck. See you in a month.

I don’t understand why the body can’t be seen as a whole, a system? That’s what it is. It’s true, all I can treat is the diabetes as far as I know. But one of the conditions I have been diagnosed with has similar symptoms as diabetes, including weight gain, and it can potentially paralyze or kill you.

Once again, for however many times, the VA has taken me out into the woods and left me to find my way home by myself. I have, at least for the unforeseeable future or perhaps the rest of my life, chronic pain that can’t be treated. It can’t even be treated by the methadone I take for pain at the opposite end of the spine from this problem. Yet, I have to somehow get up in the morning, work, live, keep going. My body might break down along the way, it might not.

I am not pleading for sympathy. There is no need for it. Like they said in olden times: “It ain’t nothin’ but a thang.” I am, instead, just talking out loud. Pretty loud at that. I am kind of going through what the late Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross described as the “Five Stages of Grief” in her acclaimed book “On Death and Dying.” Those stages are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance, although not all of those stages are reached and not necessarily in any order.

Right now I am in denial and anger over being diagnosed as diabetic. I am angry that, at least my specialist thinks, nothing can done about my most recent chronic pain. I am also depressed. I haven’t reached the bargaining and acceptance stage.

If nothing else, these stages present a way to look at the process of working out a significant problem. If my memory from classes that I took while attaining a minor in sociology — including a course on death and dying — serves me right the whole grief thing works on romantic breakups and various other traumas. It’s funny. The last “romantic” breakup I had a couple of years ago revealed only, perhpas, the acceptance stage and none of the other five. I suppose that could be like the exchange method of dieting, I could exchange two of glee for one of depression.

Leave ’em laughing. Sorry, I am just talking to myself.