(Dobbs) I Feel Like I've Been Shot

“The hip bone’s connected to the shin bone.”

This one is personal, because I’ve been trying to figure out…..

How many ways can my body hurt?

In the past month, I’ve found a lot.

I’ve been diagnosed with an autoimmune disease, and it hurts all over. To be honest (am I starting to talk like Donald Trump, who isn’t?), when I say it’s an autoimmune disease, I’m throwing out a term I won’t pretend to fully understand but I looked it up and the A.I. Overview, which is the first thing that comes up nowadays when I do a search on Google, says, “Autoimmune diseases occur when the body’s immune system mistakenly attacks its own healthy cells and tissues. They affect various organs and systems in the body.”

As examples, it lists a few names we all know and never want to hear: rheumatoid arthritis, type 1 diabetes, multiple sclerosis, lupus, Graves’ disease, ulcerative colitis, Myasthenia gravis, Guillain-Barré syndrome, and inflammatory bowel disease. Don’t worry though. Once I read that list, I realized that unlike most of the columns I write, this one won’t have pictures.

What attacked me is called PolyMyalgiaRheumatica (try saying that three times fast. In fact, try saying it at all). A personal friend had the very same thing a few years ago and when we talked and I was struggling to even say the name, he told me not to bother because basically what it means is, “Many kinds of aches and pains.” So while the doctors call it PMR, I’m just calling it MAPS.

What “many kinds of aches and pains” means is, I feel like I’ve been shot. In several parts of my body. For the record, that’s only a guess, because I’ve never actually been shot. I’ve been shot at more than my share, but never shot. However, while MAPs (or for you purists, PMR) particularly affects the shoulders, the neck, and the hips, it can bring sharp, excruciating pain beyond those body parts— in my case, some of the worst has been in both of my upper arms and the fronts and the backs of the thighs on both legs.

Before generating too much sympathy, let me offer this perspective: thanks to the wonderful world of chemicals, the cure might come fast in the form of a large and long-duration dose of Prednisone. There are so many people out there whose bodies actually have been riddled with bullets, or cancer, or a hundred other life-changing issues. My pain pales next to theirs.

MAPS typically comes on abruptly, and it’s an interesting experience— there are better words than “interesting” but I won’t use them on a family website— to suddenly start hurting and have no clue what’s causing it. Actually, at the beginning I thought I did have a clue: those of you who have subscribed to this column on Substack at least since last year might remember that back in January, I wrote about having some fairly serious back surgery called a spinal fusion— my second time for that. So it was only natural when MAPS struck to connect it to the fusion.

My surgeon didn’t rule it out because an MRI a few weeks ago did show a bulging disc just above the fusion, but it sure didn’t point to anything that might cause such pain on both sides of my body and near both the upper and lower parts of my torso. What’s more, the odds were against me suddenly having two bad shoulders and two bad hips and all at the same time. In a skeletal sense, yes, just like the song says, “the hip bone’s connected to the shin bone,” but both orthopedically and neurologically, it didn’t make sense. However, although the MRI wasn’t exploding with red flags pinpointing whatever was hurting me, the surgeon said something that every doctor ought to practice: “We treat the patient, not the picture.”

Then, once I was more specific about the symptoms (a little vocabulary lesson here: when you have screaming pain, “symptoms” doesn’t really cut it), my internist, who also was in the loop, came up with the probability of MAPS (okay, okay, he used his name for it and not mine). When bloodwork came back with inflammation markers way above the norm, it was confirmed.

I can’t tell you what a relief it will be to reach for things and to stand up and sit down and get into bed and roll over in bed and sleep through the night and get out of bed and simply walk without my legs hanging onto me like leaden logs, and not feel like someone’s simultaneously stabbing several body parts with an ice pick.

But still, like I say, my body hasn’t been riddled with bullets, or cancer, or a hundred other life-changing issues. I’ll take my medicine like a good boy and if this disease takes its typical course, it could be a few years before it strikes again. And then I’ll get more medicine and take it like a good boy again.

So I’m lucky.

You’re not. You had to read this. But I appreciate it. A writer’s job is to educate and inform. If you got all the way through this, thank you.

Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He also co-authored a book about the seminal year for baby boomers, called “1969: Are You Still Listening?” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 39-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.

You can learn more at GregDobbs.net