How magic and the tarot helped diagnose my mystery medical condition!
a personal note at the end of a wild 2023...
What’s up, swimmers?! In a couple of days, we’ll talk all about 2024 and what might be in store for us energetically during a collective 8 year. Then, we’ll begin The Year of Yearning—twelve months of intentional study that kicks off in January with an exploration of burnout.
But first, I wanted to get a little long-winded personal.
One of my favorite notions about seven energy, which we all waded through together in 2023, is its spotlight on the delineation between the private, the personal, and the public. Seven is foggy energy. It speaks to twists and turns in the road that we navigate on instinct, putting one foot in front of the other even if we don’t know exactly where we’re going. This method of traveling requires a healthy dose of blind faith, of buckling in for a whole lot of questions without the promise of many answers.
I commend writers and makers who are able to experience and share at the same time; who can actively weave their present-tense thoughts, feelings, and actions into an offering to others on the path. Sadly, that way of processing was just not in the cards for me this year.
Instead, I experienced a somewhat baffling year of retreating from whatever public eye I had spent the last few years trying to capture.
2023 was a personal three year for me, a year I hoped would be chock-full of communication, creativity and magic, and while there were absolutely moments of all three, there was also the flip side of this energy: confusion, destruction, and mess. The truth is, I didn’t know how to share what was happening to me while it was happening. I still don’t really know what to make of it all. But in her latest installment of
, shared, “when you get vulnerable, other people come with you.”So, my sweet swimmers, thank you for being here, and I hope that you’ll continue to paddle alongside me.
My year started off with the gift of a new health insurance plan, and the curse that I would have to leave my longtime therapist.
Still, when the news first landed, I felt in my bones that it made total and complete sense, for I wasn’t going to be living in New York much longer anyway.
The decision to move, which was ultimately realized in the first few months of the year, was one that my wife and I had been agonizing over since the beginning of the pandemic. Before 2020, we’d never considered leaving New York. I had personally, once before in 2016, but since deciding to return, it seemed as if I had another bite to take out of the Big Apple.
So I stayed in New York.
But then we became cooped up, COVID, house cats—which is a fine way to live if you have a nice place with plenty of sunspots to stretch and sleep in. It’s less ideal if you live in a pair of dark, and expensive, rooms that you share with your wife and dog, who are also looking to spread out in the same small space.
So we moved to Los Angeles.
Now, this is where I have to give the seven year its props:
Seven, although deeply tied to spirituality and seeking, is a practical number. It continues the journey that the numbers one and four have embarked on by daring to consider new options. Seven is a new adventure in the form of movement. It’s the hermit crab moving from one, too tight shell to another. Seven comes after the expansion of six, and before the deepening of eight. It is the legwork needed to move from point A to point B.
Never before in my life has the runway been so clear to make a move. 2023 provided my little family with easy, breezy, beautiful green lights. Very little held us back from taking the actions needed to move across the country. I will forever be grateful for the general ease with which we uprooted our entire lives, and I will be forever in awe of the warmth with which we were welcomed into our new ones. Those are blessings that cannot be taken for granted.
Especially because that’s when my personal year started to head downhill…
TW: Body pain, treatment, and general medical content
By June, my decision to throw myself head first into the move and our new digs in sunny LA had left me with severe pain in both of my wrists and hands. I learned the hard way that one cannot build an entire house of furniture with tiny Allen wrenches, and weed an entire overgrown garden of dandelions taller then one’s self, without experiencing some physical consequences.
Being a writer, who hopes to continue to weave a living out of words, this injury was an even more unpleasant pain to grapple with. But 2023 had also gifted me with the realization of a lifelong dream—a literary agent! (Hi Kelly!) So I slapped on some braces, and started a new novel.
By August, as I was preparing to go on vacation with my friends, the pain was worse, and my fears of carpel tunnel were great enough to get me to an orthopedic surgeon in LA. Luckily, the diagnosis was tendonitis, which meant I didn’t need surgery, but would need to continue to take it easy as I healed. I was given a prescription for physical therapy, a steroid shot in the thumb for some treatable inflammation, and sent on my merry way.
In the weeks that followed, I devolved from a (fairly) healthy, thirty-one year old woman with a couple of hurt wrists, to a practically immobile, medical anomaly taking a “very reputable” arthritis medication.
I had no idea what was going on, and why it had come on so suddenly, I only knew that I could barely move. For months, I experienced daily, debilitating pain throughout my entire body. I couldn’t raise my arms or lift my legs, the pain in my shoulders and hips no longer allowed me to sleep on my side, and my back muscles were so tense that I had trouble breathing. The bath was the only thing that provided any kind of relief, but I was no longer able to climb out without assistance from my wife.
September brought me weekly appointments with a chiropractor, a massage therapist, and an acupuncturist, as well as a new primary doctor, a referral to a rheumatologist, and a new therapist.
October brought me continued physical therapies after all of my medical tests came back perfectly normal. On paper, there was absolutely nothing wrong with me besides being “slightly” anemic. I hobbled my way into doctor’s office after doctor’s office only to be told that everything looked good, and to come back in a few months if I was still in pain.
“Do you have any questions?” I was asked by doctors not interested in asking any of their own.
“Yes,” I answered. “Only all of them.”
Then, my new therapist got a new job and fired me as a client, and I fell headfirst into the pit.
By Halloween, I was hanging on by a thread, so I called my trusted witch and asked for a reading. I hadn’t been able to engage with anything magical in the months I’d been in pain, too mad at my proverbial sky daddy to consider finding comfort in a deck of cards or an anointed candle, but this felt doable. Plus, I needed the community. I needed the connection. I needed for someone to sit in the pit with me and say that it was okay that I couldn’t see a way out just yet.
My witch pulled some cards and then gave me a look. “I can’t believe I’m about to ask you this,” she said. “But is there any chance that you’ve been poisoned?”
We gawked at the notion, but at this point, who the hell could say?! I was open for any possible answer or any new path to figuring out what was happening to me.
As we conversed, and picked and pulled apart the cards and their meanings, three questions came to light:
Could this be an LA-based injury that possibly happened while I was gardening?
Could I have been bitten on the hand by a spider or other insect?
Finally, again, could I have been poisoned?
In November, I went back to the doctor for a new round of tests, this time focusing on two things: environmental toxins and a possible myopathy, which is a term for a group of disorders that affect the skeletal muscle system, and my latest armchair expert theory for what I was experiencing.
Again, everything came back normal.
Discouraged, I swore off seeking new medical answers for the rest of the year. All of these questions would just have to carry me through to 2024, where hopefully I’d find some fuel in the tank to continue figuring out what the fuck had happened to me.
I was also feeling a smidge of physical relief, so I finally rescheduled a trip I had postponed due to health issues, got on a plane, and went to my hometown to meet my friend’s newest baby. However, the first night there, I ended up video chatting with some buds back East—the same ones that I went on vacation with in August. One of our friends has been dealing with familial health issues, so I caught her up to speed on my shit, telling her that she saw the last “normal” version of me all of those months ago.
She says, “Didn’t you get a shot of something right before we went to Chicago?”
“No…” I hesitated as I thought back to August.
But then I remembered the steroid shot that the orthopedic surgeon gave me—a prick to the hand to treat a gardening injury.
“You’ve been poisoned by that shot,” my friend stated like it was a fact.
Turns out, she was right! As was my witch; as was I.
There is ample evidence to support that what I’ve been experiencing is a steroid-induced myopathy, the exact type of condition I’d zeroed in on before the last round of testing.
From there, the puzzle pieces started clicking into place—It’s a diagnosis by elimination, meaning everything else has been ruled out, the symptoms and the timeline all fit perfectly, and the kicker? The traditional tests for myopathies don’t work on drug-induced myopathies because the steroid lowers all of the levels even if it’s literally poisoning your body.
PHEW! WHAT THE FUCK! MAGIC IS REAL! HAHAHAALSFKJLK!
Thank everything that is holy, December has brought me some relief. The adverse reaction that my body has been having to the steroid has subsided, and now I’m much more mobile! I went to New York to visit my friends! I traveled to spend the holidays with my in-laws! I can sleep on my side again! And I can move into the recovery phase of this deeply bizarre, yet somewhat common, medical injury. While that may take six months to a year, the good news is that most people who suffer steroid-induced myopathies do make a full recovery.
I’m a bit too shell-shocked to feel completely relieved, but I do know that this is the best case scenario. I am grateful that it doesn’t appear to be a chronic, lifelong condition, despite preparing myself for months for that to be the outcome. I’m the happiest person who’s ever been poisoned!
Now, I’m not sharing this information to warn anyone or to get on some anti-steroid soapbox, although I do caution folks to do research and ask for information on possible side effects and adverse reactions of drugs that are being administered.
I’m sharing because this year, while I’ve been largely quiet or sharing other people’s words, I left the home I’d worked for twelve years to build, moved my family and my business to a completely new coast, home, community, and terrain, and then had the only other home I have—my body—become completely compromised and debilitated with very little explanation.
Suddenly, the privacy that I was already feeling drawn to in this seven year took over everything. I had very little energy to get personal, and absolutely zero desire to go public.
2023 is not a year that I would like to repeat, but it has given me the gift of a life that I would like to take pleasure in next year. It has offered me the opportunity to stay vigilant, to care for and advocate for myself, to continue reaching out to my loved ones for help and support, and, in a world that is not built for broken bodies, it has also deepened my understanding of and passion for disability justice, a topic that I think will be spotlighted in 2024.
Again, I don’t know what to make of it all, but here I am, breathing and blinking, and thank goodness for that!
If you’re still reading this, BLESS YOU, and thank you. Thank you for supporting my work, for reading my words, and for allowing me to take up space in your life. I’m so excited to get back to doing what I love to do—learning, teaching, sharing, finding awe and wonder in the mundane aspects of life—and I’m grateful that you’re along for the ride!
May 2024 bring us clarity, answers, good health, and a way forward.
I’ll see you in a few days, but also next year!
Wow this is so scary and I’m glad you figured it out and are feeling some relief! I had no idea this was a thing but I’m glad to know about it.
Holy cow! I knew I’d missed reading your work this year but had no idea all the struggles you’d been experiencing! I’m very excited to see you back and can’t wait to read more!