The Mystery Illnesses

Our family is one of the healthiest I know in terms of everyday illness. Andrew had exactly one cold/ear infection thing and one stomach bug in his first year of life, and that's it. Maddy had same one cold/ear thing and one stomach bug too. Teresa had the stomach bug but nothing else - not even a single cold - in all this past winter. I attribute this, of course, to extended breastfeeding and our family's borderline-obsessive-compulsive use of hand sanitizer.

The trade off, apparently, is that while we rarely get your everyday viruses and the like, we seem to be disproportionately afflicted with the more unusual stuff. Andrew was hospitalized for and survived not one, but two, life-threatening conditions in his first 9 months of life.

And now, Teresa and I are both suffering from mystery conditions that have our doctors seemingly stumped.

Teresa has had what our GI calls cyclical vomiting for nearly two years now, and it had been misdiagnosed and mistreated originally as reflux and/or slight asthma. She has random episodes of gagging and vomiting that have no apparent cause or correlation. She experiences a gagging/choking sensation, gets sick if she eats anything, and then after a period of a couple of hours, is completely fine, running around playing and eating anything she wants with no problem. She's had an upper GI series, an abdominal ultrasound, and is scheduled for additional testing to try to figure out what's going on with her.

I, for the past 3 months, have had increasingly severe joint/muscle pain. It moves around, different joints hurting for a day or so and then changing to others. I'm not exaggerating - it sometimes gets so bad I can barely function. Saturday night, I was almost in tears by the time we got home - my neck hurt so much, and was so stiff, I couldn't move my head at all. Yesterday, it was my ankle - I almost fell down the stairs while carrying Andrew because my ankle hurt so much and was so "locked up" that I couldn't bend it on the step. And this morning, I had to have Steve clasp my bra for me because I couldn't bend my wrist, which was killing me, at the angle I needed to reach behind my back. It's crazy. But I know I'm not imagining it - it hurts like hell. It's affected my head/neck, elbows, wrists, fingers, knees, ankles, and feet at various times. I've been living on Advil, which I'm really not thrilled about.

So far, my internal medicine doctor has tested me for everything logical that she can think of - Lyme disease to rheumatoid arthritis - and everything has been negative. So, the mystery continues.