One of the beautiful sites of Colorado Springs
Sister Howlett had recently gone through a flare-up of her Multiple Sclerosis (MS). It had been in remission for 14 years, but due to the extremely hot weather (up to 112 degrees F) here in Kansas during the summer months, the MS in her body created another flare-up. MS is a disease where the body of the person who has it decides to attack the myelin sheath or insulation around the nerves of the body, thus creating a “short” in the particular nerves that have been targeted. These flare-ups are usually triggered by extreme heat and/or extreme exhaustion. The funny thing about this is that the flare-up didn’t happen until the weather began to cool down! Why did it wait a while before reacting? It would be interesting to find that out.
Anyway the symptom of this flare-up was vertigo or excessive dizziness. Everything was spinning around and Sister Howlett could not walk well and felt very weak and sick to her stomach. Luckily she was referred to, Carmen Wilhelm, the nurse-practitioner at the local walk-in clinic, who has MS and knew what to do to work through these flare-ups. She prescribed Solumedral to be given in 6 I.V. administrations over a 3 day period. It went very well and stopped the dizziness, though it created side effects of a very painful stomach ache for her, but that subsided with some additional help. Several tests were taken during all the procedures and we received good documentation of all these tests. We took the information with us to Colorado Springs to show the Neurologist, Dr. Komatenini, a very kind and competent doctor from India. It all helped the doctor decide that I had been well taken care of.
Then she suggested that I receive daily or at least weekly injections to keep future MS flare-ups from recurring. But since it has been 14 years since the last flare-up, I decided not to take the injections for now. The doctor said I may not need the injections and could just deal with the MS in the way I had been doing previously. So we decided to ask the Lord to guide us in this decision and we feel He is directing us to find a more natural way to deal with this. A sister in Garden City, Kansas Ward, who also has MS, took the shots for seven years and felt very tired, depressed and unable to function well. She finally refused to take any more shots, much to her doctor's chagrin. She is now using a special herb called Moringa Oleifera to help her deal with her MS and she is doing very well. We may look into that, since we tend to lean more toward natural herbs for healing our bodies, if we can. We feel the Lord created things in this world to help us with our ailments, if we can just find what they are.
The same day Elder and Sister Howlett had appointments with a dermatologist. Upon meeting our doctor in the examining room, he introduced himself as Dr. Babcock and then said we could also call him Brother Babcock, since he is also a member of our church. It was a very pleasant surprise. He checked some sores on Sister Howlett’s face that don’t seem to be healing. Four of them he said looked like pre-cancerous spots and he froze them with liquid nitrogen. The fifth sore he took a biopsy of to see if it might already be a skin cancer. We finally found out it is, so now we have an appointment to go back to Colorado Springs after Thanksgiving to have it safely removed.
Elder Howlett next to our car which is in front of the Colorado Colorado Springs Mission home where we spent Tuesday night.
Elder Howlett also had the doctor look at some bumps above his ear, that turned out to be harmless, and a skin rash on one leg. After examining the leg and viewing some pictures we had of the recurring rash on his leg, the doctor prescribed some medicine for it and we were on our way. It was a good day of doctor’s visits, though a tiring one after having left Garden city at 6 am and driving steadily to make it to the appointments in the early afternoon. But it was a great success for us.
1 comment:
So glad all ended well! and Glad you are back up and running!
The pictures are beautiful!
Love you!
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