If you recall I began thusly:
The convoluted course of treatment continues. With every potential step forward, a complication arises, including the difficulty in pinpointing causation. How many elements? What should be addressed first? When does this all make sense?
I cannot say nothing is happening. I just cannot see tangible results -- at least not yet.
Fighting is a marathon. Sometimes when I have thought "I got this" I find at best I achieved the end of the beginning, not the beginning of the end.
Let that sink in: the end of the beginning. The person saying this experienced her tick bite in 1996. Sure, the real downward slide began after 2002, but no matter how the chronology gets parceled, it remains a looooonnnnnnngg time.
Really, there were multiple things I contemplated when I wrote the above introduction. The one I did not get to concerned my last trip to the doctor.
This past month had ups and downs, with the downs being way too obvious. The worst of it was the extra struggles I had maintaining any semblance of balance while moving.
Here is how it goes down (or I go down) when these episodes occur.
It started when I tried standing up from the toilet and pivoted to reach the handle for flushing. My weight went back into my heels and my toes came up and my socked feet, a bit slippery on a tiled floor, began to slide out from under me.
I reached my left arm back, hoping to find wall. They found a door (that bathroom has two, one into a bedroom, one into a hallway) and my finger curled around the door. My weight kept pushing the door back. It was going to slam slut and crush or break my fingers. All I thought about was preventing that by forcing my body forward.
I corrected too much and there was no way to stop. Fortunately, I avoided smacking my head on the toilet. Instead, the top/side of my head found a heavy metal fixture that hangs the toilet paper. Hit that hard and much of it crashed to the floor. I fell in a heap, rather dazed in the aftermath. Only after 10 plus minutes later, after I ate, did I feel my head clear. Fortunately, there was no other injury or permanence that I recognize to the injury. All in all, I escaped because the situation could have wound up far worse.
Unfortunately, I am no stranger to incidents like this though I had been hopeful of reducing their frequency while on a drug protocol. That's what makes the incident upsetting. It is indicative of a bad month and an overall lack of improvement.
I am told this is so typical it is pedestrian as standard operating procedure.
In any case, I confessed this to my doctor, wondering if it wasn't time to make my treatment even more aggressive (though I don't know what that would be exactly or how I would handle it).
His view is that the persistence of candida in my body holds me back. And yet I have no dairy, no sugar, no gluten/grain. I switched my probiotic to ensure there was no dairy in it. I am uncertain that all my supplements are similarly clean but based on what they are, I cannot imagine why they would possess any aggravating ingredient.
The only thing that makes sense is that I have had the problem for a long time, making it entrenched, and my antibiotics are keeping candida around. I had some horrible pains last night I really do not want to describe in depth but they seem to be rooted in a vaginal candida. It's likely in the digestive tract, too.
The doctor recommended that I take one teaspoon of Apple Cider Vinegar twice a day. I can address candida as well as lessen my body's acidity. It is not easy to take. So far, I put it in a small amount of raspberry tea and have more of the tea by itself after swallowing the mixture. And I also hold my nose when I swallow the ACV/tea combo. Even with mixing the two, the ACV still burns some to drink.
Nonetheless, the feeling of gas dispersal or resolution after I drink it brings some relief.
I write this, though, to realize the title: Progress. I seek progress. It's out there, somewhere. I also sought to reorder certain supplements that I think helped me seem better before this past month.