Since I got diagnosed with type 2 inflammation and got placed on Dupixent there have been so many changes in my life. In the way I feel, in the things I am able to do, and in the way my mind works and how well I am able to think. Some of these changes have been amazing. Like I no longer feel like I have hives inside of my face for hours of every day. That has made a huge difference in the way that I feel on a daily basis. I can finally breathe through my nose again. It had been so long; I wasn’t sure that that was something that was actually going to ever return. Some of the changes have been a bit disheartening in some ways. Like how since I got diagnosed, I have been more able to clearly identify individual triggers of things that aggravate my body. Which, although a good thing, has caused me to have to drastically reduce me diet, as I found that I was eating foods that I have apparently been allergic to all of my life. (That’s the frustrating thing about type 4 allergies. The symptoms creep up on you, which means that instead of trying to kill you quick, they slowly suck away at your life, health and energy until you kind of just wished you were dead.) Other changes have just sent my world into a tailspin, being potentially good, while being just immediately complicated. An example of that is my brain. I had NO IDEA just how much being sick and exhausted for all of these years had affected my ability to think. I knew my ability to think was affected; just, not the full scope of how it was affected. So now, on my better, less headachy parts of the day or days, I find my brain to be a kaleidoscope of thoughts, rapidly spinning and twisting all around, leaving me feeling completely unable to focus on any particular thing. While being unfocused due to issues, is not new for me, feeling overwhelmed with the constant barrage of thoughts, past and present, swirling madly around me with random frenzy is not something that I am accustomed to.
Instead of trying to think about anything past the overwhelming itching inside of my face, watering eyes and draining nose; I instead have what feels like millions of thoughts flying through my head at warp speed. It feels like I am attempting to harness a tornado that lives inside of my head. No matter how hard I try to grab ahold of something, it just feels like everything is slipping right through my fingers while simultaneously sucking me into a bottomless vortex. I spent twenty minutes just sitting here at my desk, trying to harness a single thought, a single concept to focus on today, but without success. Finally, I gave up. I couldn’t get anything to solidify enough for me to grab ahold of. So, I opted to start talking about what was right in front of me instead. My own inability to focus.
It’s been weird having all of these changes happen inside of my mind. Sometimes it feels like there are parts of my brain waking up that I didn’t even remember existed. I will look at something that I know I have seen a thousand times and I will realize something so random and obvious about it. Or all of a sudden I get clarity about something that happened four years ago that had been completely eluding me. And I realize that that doesn’t sound all that different from what any one of us go through in life. Having moments of unexpected clarity where the pieces of the puzzle in front of us suddenly come together. I get that. It’s so hard on this side of things to explain. It’s kind of like when you have a super terrible head cold and you just can’t think at all. Then you take cold medicine to help diffuse your symptoms but then it just makes you really tired and muddled. At that point, on one hand, you feel like you are doing better. But on the other hand, deep down, you know that you are so far gone that you shouldn’t even be allowed to drive a car or sign any kind of legal document. Then a few days pass and you start to feel a lot better. The pressure in your head goes down. The fog starts to clear. You don’t have to take cold medicine any longer and suddenly, everything that didn’t get done during those days of being sick suddenly is right there in front of your face, all at once, demanding your undivided attention. In that moment, as glad as you are to be feeling better, you feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of things before you, and you just feel compelled to run away. Or maybe that’s just me, lol. But it’s kind of like that….only on more of the scale of a Hollywood F5 tornado. Sucking me up into the vortex and spinning me out of control. And that’s where I’m at today.
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