Seeing the rheumatologist, TMJ replacement, chronic pain, moving again🦋

[Music] Hello! I haven't done a vlog little sit-down talk chit chat in so long just because ever since I moved into my new place I've just kind of been super super busy getting adjusted to new routines, trying to maintain my work life. Honestly, the workload that I've been dealing with the past few months ever since moving has just been increasingly getting busier and busier. I low-key feel like I'm struggling and drowning a little bit trying to keep a float because I literally handle everything when it comes to my own business. I have multiple streams of income, we know with my Etsy YouTube and also my one-on-one coaching, things like that and there's just so much that goes into it outside of what you see that is just so difficult. I do all the administration type of work too so just answering emails, answering messages I get on Etsy to my shop and things like that. It's just a lot. I've been getting to a point recently where I can't even. I don't even have enough time on my work week to finish everything and I've been having to work on weekends to finish up everything and I feel like I'm kind of rounding the corner into a place where I have to try to readjust my workload a little bit to fit my needs a little bit more because one thing about chronic illness is when you have chronic pain you can't push yourself even if you want to or even if you have to. In many ways that's really difficult to live with but for me in my own personal life I almost see it as a blessing in disguise because I've went through my whole life pushing myself past my limits and that's usually not for good things. Yes, that made me accomplish things in the past but overall it's not good to push yourself past your limits. It's good to follow an intuitive approach to things. I know sometimes you can't afford to do it but I think there are ways that you could integrate intuition into your life and we grow so detached from our intuition and what feels right to us and what's good for us and so in that sense having chronic pain does help force me to intuitively tap into what is pushing myself too much and what I need to do to help take care of myself and bring more balance. That's something that I've had to learn the past few months very harshly is what those limits are and how to respect those boundaries that my body is literally setting for me. I can't push myself workwise. I can't push myself physically when it comes to movement and working out. I can't push myself emotionally even when it comes to taking on other people's emotional baggage and helping them process through it. There's all these boundaries that I'm learning within this past year when it comes to taking things on. I feel like I'm finally slowly coming to terms with it and understanding what those boundaries are. But yeah, I just wanted to update you guys because I know probably a few people on here care to know about my personal life outside of my videos and I haven't updated you guys in a while and so there's about to be big changes coming on and I don't want to pull that classic neurodivergent thing where you disappear and come back with all these changes and everyone's like whoa what the heck happened because you don't know how to keep people up to date with you and what's going on. Right off the bat just to keep you guys updated with my health. I am scheduled to see a cardiologist and a rheumatologist. I've had multiple appointments with my new general doctor and that was a whole thing because when I moved I had my first appointment with a new general doctor and she tried to diagnose me with hypokondria when I was talking to her about my chronic pain and so needless to say I didn't stick with her. I changed doctors and that new doctor is a lot more attentive and she referred me out to these other specialists to do further testing. I did a full blood panel. I'm not gonna go through all the results but my ANA was higher than normal and ANA is basically like the antibodies in your body I believe and I had a higher count of antibodies so what that indicates is if your body is not actively fighting off an illness or sickness then those antibodies are actually fighting yourself. It's attacking your own body. My doctor said this could be the reason why I'm experiencing chronic pain is because of these antibodies and so the rheumatologist is going to be the person who is going to help me figure that stuff out but you know I'm not going to see the rheumatologist for a while because the medical system here in America is not great and anytime you need to see anyone about anything it usually takes a long time for you to finally see them so I scheduled that appointment with the rheumatologist months ago and I'm just kind of waiting for that appointment. Hopefully the doctor is attentive and will help me because that's not always the case. The cardiologist is going to attach something to me to keep track of my heartbeat for I think two weeks because I have issues with heart related symptoms and stuff like that. Another health update is I've been chugging along with my jaw issues. I've had I think three appointments now with my jaw surgeon and he wants to schedule me for a bilateral joint replacement so the joints in my jaw he says are degraded to a point where they both need to be replaced. He also wants to fix my jaw placement because I have a misaligned jaw that causes a lot of other medical symptoms and so he wants to bring my lower jaw forward and that's been a whole freaking process. You guys have no idea how long and arduous this process has been. Just going back and forth from insurance to the surgeon to the orthodontist going from medical insurance to dental insurance and then trying to figure out if I could get the orthodontic work covered because it's not for my teeth it's for the surgery basically. Finally figuring that out only to hear from the orthodontist that they won't put my pre-surgical braces on until I've gotten a deep cleaning with my teeth and I haven't established care with a new dentist yet so I had to get that done and the new dentist has to submit stuff to my insurance to basically do a deep cleaning of my teeth. This has been for a year now you guys that I've been trying to figure this out a whole year and it's just it's so insane and I'm trying not to go crazy because I've been here before with the endometriosis and I'm just here again. It's honestly so crazy how one surgery can take years to happen. I wanted to get this surgery done last year and I thought that I would have had it done by now this time in 2023 and I'm not even close. Like I've come to realize that I need to get these pre-surgical braces. That's a change you guys are gonna see is you guys are gonna see me with braces on for almost I think the next two years but I have to get these pre-surgical braces on so they could move my teeth to adjust to the new jaw placement that I'm gonna have a year from now and so I'm gonna have these braces in for about a year and then after that they have to take a scan of my skull and my jaw and my new teeth placement and basically order new titanium joints for my jaw to be made which will take another six months. If everything goes smoothly which it's not really it'll be a year and a half before I could finally get the surgery scheduled so basically I won't have the surgery until I'm like 29 years old you know I'm trying to think about it from a Hawkeye perspective so that I don't get too overwhelmed in this whole process. I will at least have a lot of my medical things taken care of before I turn 30. Hopefully I'll have other stuff figured out with my chronic pain too during this time. It's so crazy to plan your life like this you guys. Honestly you don't worry if you're younger but I feel like when you hit around like 27 you start to think about these types of things and plan it out which I think is good because you want to plan these things out you don't want to just like have life happen to you right. That's just a little health update first I'm handling my jaw and then as I'm handling my jaw issues I'm also handling my issues with my body with the chronic pain. Still don't really have answers for that yet because I still have to get a bunch of tests done but my general doctor kind of tentatively thinks that I might have an autoimmune condition. We just don't know what it is specifically yet but I will keep you guys updated with that and I've been chugging along as well with lifestyle changes when it comes to managing my pain just slowly integrating those practices into my day-to-day and that's something I'm going to share with you guys as well when I have that. I'm very much so well integrated because some things do work and some things don't work for me and I want to be able to test that out for myself and the advice I want to give to you guys I want it to come from a genuine place and it's not just these things that you hear online of people like do this do that and it's like these fads like this is for me very serious it's my health it's not just a fat it's like lifelong changes that I have to integrate and make for myself and I'm just so happen to share it on my channel for other people who might struggle with the same things. Another really big change that's happening is we're moving again that's something I'm also not really looking for to and I've been kind of compartmentalizing a little bit. We're with that, we're gonna move at the end of this month of October. And the reason for this move is pretty simple. It's because the apartment we originally wanted wasn't available when we were moving, but now it's become available. And my partner and I had discussed before moving that if this apartment was gonna become available, were we willing to break our lease for it? And we both agreed that we were, even though it was gonna cost extra money and be a lot of extra work. We just didn't expect for this apartment to become available so soon, because we've only been at this new place for, I don't know, two to three months now. I think three months. During that time, those three months, my partner has been checking every single week to see if this new apartment would become available, because the thing about this place is that we get a lot of space for how much money it is. It's basically a two-bedroom apartment, but we're paying the price of a one-bedroom apartment. And so we were just checking and checking and checking. I honestly think my partner manifested it because the week before the apartment became available, he was just talking about how he wouldn't mind living at a certain part of our apartment complex, facing a certain direction with certain trees and stuff like that. And literally that same weekend, that apartment in that specific area became available. Honestly, just by all of the very intense changes that come with moving and all of the objective, hard work that it comes with as well, I am extremely excited to move into this place because that is the place that we wanted to move into to begin with and the fact that it became available so soon is kind of crazy to me. Because to be honest with you guys, the place that we're at now, I'm not a huge fan of and I didn't wanna say that. I didn't wanna say that because I didn't know how long we were gonna be here for and I don't like to just be in the mentality of complaining about things and seeing all the wrongs because I will create my own personal hell by doing that, I've done that before. But now that I know I'm moving out by the end of this month, I am going to go to town and complain to you guys about what I don't like about this apartment. So one thing I don't like is that the way that it's formatted, it doesn't get any light ever. And for someone who is literally at home 24/7 and never leaves, I need light in my apartment because it doesn't feel good to just be in a dark hole all the time. I'm not the type to be a fan of really bright things but it does feel kind of depressing to me and that's something I noticed the past three months is having no light in my apartment actually does make me feel depressed because I have no concept of time. I don't know when it's daylight, I don't know when it's nighttime because it's just always dark. And for me, I don't like turning on lights to begin with so when I have no lights on in here on top of not getting natural light, it's just like a frickin basement cave. This new apartment that we're gonna move into is not only bigger but the way that the layout is shaped is in a way where I'm gonna be having light in every room that I'm going to be in in that time of day. So my office is gonna have light during the daytime and then our living room is gonna have light during the evening when we're in there. So I'm super excited for that. This apartment, it's backwards. So our room has light during the day when we're not in there and then the living room slash my office has no light during the daytime when I'm in here. So I'm basically just experiencing nighttime all the time 24/7. And that affects my health too because I literally have a vitamin D deficiency. I've been having to take a lot of vitamin D supplements to make sure that I'm getting enough vitamin D and just little things like that make it very difficult. And also I think my partner and I just would prefer to have that extra space for me working at home and being a home body. I wanna have my own office so that I could sequester everything in the office for office stuff and leave work at work when I am not working. So I wanna feel like I'm going to work during the day and then after I'm done with work, I could just close my office door and turn the rest of the house and feel like I'm at home now. You know, little things like that matter a lot to me. So I'm really excited about that. And I feel like looking back now and reflecting, I should have known that my partner and I wouldn't stay in this specific apartment for too long because we didn't ever really settle down fully here. There's still some things we haven't unpacked. Those are those little signs that I should have tapped into and been like, this isn't the forever place, but we know and we've discussed that this new place that we're moving into, that we're breaking our lease for is gonna be somewhere we're probably gonna stay for the next two to three years, you know? And I'm just excited for that. I'm excited to have a place to settle down in that I will actually like and to know that I will be there for a few years because having that sort of stability at home is really, really important to me. But yeah, other than that, thank you guys for staying this long and listening to my life updates and caring. I honestly don't mind if only like five people really stay tuned in this type of video. I personally like hearing people sit down and talk about their life. I prefer that over like these videos that have no dialogue and it's just like a bunch of visuals and showing you what they're doing. Like, I don't really care about what you're doing. I care about what's in your mind and what's going on. Esoteric, right? Esoteric. Not a lot of people are gonna understand me or care, but as long as a few people care, that's all that matters. I don't need hundreds and thousands of people caring about what I'm doing. Make sure you guys take some time to regulate yourself today and to feel a sense of comfort and peace. That's really important as a neurodivergent person in such a chaotic, neuro-typical world. Stay tuned for my braces. Stay tuned for my move. I'm sure a lot of people are gonna be very confused when those changes come, but you guys who stuck around and listened to this video, you guys will know. And you guys won't be surprised when you see me pop up in a future video with braces or pop up in a future video in a completely different apartment. You guys will know before everyone else knows. I will see you guys in the next one. Bye.