My love/hate relationship with snow

Hi friends,

So I am sitting here inside while the polar vortex descends all around me. Columbus, Ohio is slowing finishing its transformation to Antarctica. Anyway, I thought this might be a good time for me to rant about how much a hate the snow, but love it at the same time.

First of all, nobody can reject the plain and simple fact that fresh snow is amazingly beautiful. Engineering side note: snow is super fluffy and therefore absorbs sound really well, so it makes snowy nights super quiet and peaceful. I love that.

Okay now on to the rant. Snow (second to sand) is like THE most irritating substance to try to walk on. My freaking feet are unstable enough on solid ground, let alone the solid/liquid (soquid? haha) death that is snow. It literally wears me out. Most days, my feet are fine until the walk back to my car when they start to get tired and begin to hurt. On snowy days, however, I can't even make it out of the parking lot in the morning before I am ready to just call it a day and go home. I guess the question I need to be asking is whether or not it's socially acceptable to wear snow shoes whilst walking to classes on campus. Probably not. :(

Anyway, I hope all of you are staying warm, wherever you may be. Until next time....

Joey :)

Blog inspiration and a few other thoughts

Hello again,

Today, I wanted to share a few thoughts which have been on my mind. Be warned, the tone of this post is probably a bit more serious and less upbeat than my usual. Who knows, maybe it is because I'm spending Valentine's Day sitting in a computer lab on campus. #engineering :-P

First, I wanted to talk for a moment about unity and togetherness, especially between people with chronic illnesses. I'm not sure how many of you have read the short bio on the right side of the blog, but in there it talks about my motivation for starting this blog in the first place. While I was on an intership, I was in a meeting where it came up that I had a chronic, incurable (at the moment) disease. I don't remember how exactly it had come up, but that is not the important part. The important part is when one of my coworkers, John, talked to me after the meeting about my CMT. During the course of our conversation, John revealed to me that he had Cystic Fibrosis. If you know what CF is, you know it is quite a scary disease. He said he felt comfortable talking to me about it because I had CMT, like we had a sort of bond because we've both experienced the hardships of a broken body. At first that caught me off guard, because I had never thought about it that way. However, the more I thought about it, the more I knew he was totally right. Turns out John has a blog where he talks about his CF, networks with others who have CF, and generally shares his life story. What an inspiration. One day, he finally convinced me to start this blog, and now because of him, I'm hooked. I invite you to take a look at his blog here.

Anyway, please note that I'm not trying to say that CMT is comparable to CF (not in the least), but  I am trying to say that my experience with CMT has given me more insight into the way someone like John might think and feel. However, I don't think you need to have struggled through a disease to have those insights. Sometimes I think we spend so much time thinking about hiding our problems, or running away from them, and it's easy (for me, at least) to forget that people have all sorts of hardships in their lives. Similar to the materialistic mindset of "If I just had this new gadget/car/phone/thing, I would be more happy in my life," I think it's easy for people like me, or like John, to think that "If I just could cure my CMT/CF, everything in my life would be great!" For the lack of a better term, this is complete bullshit.

Okay, now let me discuss that for a moment, before you get angry. Am I saying that curing CF or CMT would not be a good thing? Absolutely not. Would it be nice to not have CMT? Of course. But would it make me happier? Probably not.

I'm not trying to be de-motivational here, please understand that. I encourage everyone to face their problems head on, and believe me, I am going to fight CMT until my dying breath, but we just need to remember to live our lives along the way. The path to happiness is not a new TV, it's not a mansion with a 10 car garage, and it's definitely not a disease-free body.

I hope y'all have a good weekend!


Joey

Upcoming Surgery

Howdy,

This post is going to be more medically oriented, so those of you who don't like medical things may want to skip this one. SHIELD YOUR EYES! Ha.

I have determined that I will most likely have surgery on my right foot this summer. For those of you who don't know, about two years ago, I had a major ankle reconstruction surgery on my left foot. I'll post a picture of the x-ray below. Overall, the results have been astounding. I can stand for hours without any pain, weight is evenly spread from the ball of my foot to my heel, and my gait is significantly more stable. Most surprising, my left foot can almost pass as normal now.

Anyway I have eyeballed this summer as being the best time to knock out my other foot. Between my study abroad trip and the start of grad school, I should have about two months to recover. I'm anticipating three months before I'll be out of a boot, but I should be reasonably healed by the time school starts.

Here is my concern: Last time, the biggest issue with the surgery was the muscle atrophy in my calf. It's been two years and my post surgery calf is still noticeably smaller than the other.

Here is my idea: I'm going to start seeing a neurologist. I want to see if it would be possible to use some sort of electrical stimulation to contract my calf muscles and keep them alive while I'm in the cast. I know people use electrical stimulation in physical therapy, but I'm curious about its use in this particular aspect. A family friend (who is a doctor) mentioned that there had been studies done and they had shown promising results.

We'll see how my appointment with a neurologist goes, but I think convincing my orthopedic surgeon to do some sort of electrical stimulation might be challenging. Unfortunately, it seems that specialists have tunnel vision and I just hope he will agree to look into it.

My CMT friends, have you ever heard of this being done? Let me know your thoughts below! Also, post about any surgeries you've had, how your recoveries went, and any other related thoughts!

Until next time,

Joey

Validation

I don't have too much time this week for a new post, but some things are just too good to pass up. This post will be short, but sweet (I think). You people, yes you who are currently reading this, should feel special; I am being very open here.

A few posts back, I wrote about dating with CMT. Well, long story short, Joey is still on the market, but this time I have been pleasantly surprised by a person I met. There is a reasonably good chance that this person might be reading this, so if you are: yes this is about you, sorry :). Anyway, before I ever go on a date with someone, we exchange phone numbers, social media usernames, etc, and we both "creep" on each others profiles to determine if the other person is an axe murderer, or if they are worth a night out. So on my most recent date, dinner went well, and I was invited back to the other person's house to watch a movie. I will spare you the details (don't worry, it was all PG), but eventually we got around to some more small talk. Since I'm only a college student, my date asked me about my high school life, specifically about whether or not I participated in any sports. Here is where it gets interesting. I explained to my date that while I did marching band, I stayed away from most sports because I have "interesting feet." To my bewilderment, they said "I know."

Wait, what? You know? Are you like stalking me? I'm reasonably private about my CMT (unless you ask), so I was slightly...err very...confused.

They explained "I saw you had a blog on Facebook. I read your posts and looked up what CMT was. I didn't notice anything at dinner, and I still haven't noticed anything. Even if I had noticed, I couldn't care less if you have 'interesting feet.'"

Ho. Lee. Crap. I was speechless (which is incredibly rare, haha). If there is ever a source of anxiety in my life, especially on a date, it is CMT. How do I bring it up when I know they want to ask? And how to I not make it a big deal at the same time? I can honestly say I have never felt like I did when my date told me they looked up CMT. I don't know how best to describe it, but it is most certainly very, very good. Maybe I am completely over thinking this, but it is crazy to see that someone took enough of an interest in me (before we even met) to read my entire blog. I'm still kind of in shock about the whole thing.

For me, this experience provides two things:

1. Validation that there are good people are out there, and it is truly amazing when you find one.

2. Validation that being honest and open is always the best policy, and if nothing else, weeds out the worthless people.

To those of you reading who don't have CMT, this whole thing might not seem like a big deal, but I assure you, it is. It is a HUGE deal.

Alright, that is all for now. I'm not sure what my agenda was for this post, but I definitely needed to share. As always, thanks for reading :).