Month: January 2017

Have a G’Day Every Day with Oska Pulse

Posted on by akiwifreund

***Scroll to the bottom of this review for an updated offer starting in January 2019! A new, improved Oska Pulse is now available, with a better grip and longer running cycle. Just use my coupon code of SICKDATING.*** And as of March 2020, I used it to take down the inflammation in my chest due to costacondritis – inflammation of the cartilage in my sternum. Boy, if you’ve never had that, it feels like a donkey kick to the heart.

People often ask me just what it is that I do with all of my time now that I’m stuck in bed. I love writing and I count myself lucky to have been included in the Chronic Illness Bloggers network, and given many opportunities to try products I wouldn’t otherwise have access to. I have been given this product as part of a product review through the Chronic Illness Bloggers network. Although the product was a gift, all opinions in this review remain my own and I was in no way influenced by the company.

First, let’s talk about pain. I’m an expert on it. I’ve been an old lady since about the age of 23, when I got my first diagnosis of fibromyalgia.

It hasn’t stopped there. Now that I’ve had 10 brain surgeries and have been bedridden for 10 years, I have some very specific challenges. Staying in bed triggers the fibromyalgia. But I have to lay flat because when I’m upright, fluid pools in my brain and presses on my midbrain and spinal cord and causes all kinds of balance, vision, and pressure issues, and puts me at risk for seizures and strokes.

For three years I had surgeries on the right side of my body and could only lay on my left side. That put tremendous strain on my left shoulder. Four times now I have had to go through physical therapy to treat an impinged (“pinched”) nerve in the shoulder. For this last year, however, the pain was much, much worse – so bad, in fact, that I broke six teeth because I was clenching my jaw in pain. My doctors finally figured out that I had torn tendons and the actual capsule that houses the shoulder bones from all of the time I spent on that side of my body.

We tried everything: ice, heat, anti-inflammatory meds, low-grade opioids, muscle relaxants, meditation, stretching, a brace during waking hours, a brace during sleeping hours, multiple injections, light weights, joint manipulations…everything except sacrificing a chicken. For an entire year, I was in incredible pain. I couldn’t even close a cupboard door.

The surgical site side was changed to my left, so I started having to sleep only on my right. That gave my left shoulder a break, but then I started having problems in my right hip. I have to use a cane for walking because of my terrible vertigo and I walk with the cane in my right hand because I’m right-dominant, and I knew I was really going to be in trouble if both sides of my body were going to be rendered useless by pain.

Then I was contacted by Oska Wellness, Inc. to try the Oska Pulse.
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Where do I begin? First, it actually physically looks too good to be true. That was my first, honest thought. How could something so small and seemingly simple do what nothing else that doctors were trying to achieve for an entire year, throwing everything they had at me? I mean, come on – a little space ship? And we all know about those devices from those ads on TV that never amount to anything but you can get them for 3 easy payments of $29.99, and they sit in the back of your closet until you move or you divorce…

But the Oska Pulse isn’t that.
2016-11-21-13-16-08“Oska” – Australian for Oscar, the name of koala who was helped by this device after he was badly burned by a fire!

The Oska Pulse is a battery-operated, rechargeable device that gives off a pulsed, electromagnetic field to treat pain and edema. That’s the very simple explanation.

So the Oska Pulse turned into my chicken sacrifice, if you will. The note card that came with it suggested that for chronic pain, I should wear it 4-6 times at the site of pain for the first week. I immediately pushed the little round button that you see at the bottom of that picture above and placed it on my shoulder.

Now, the Oska Pulse comes with a stretchy sleeve with Velcro closure if you want to strap it on and have it stay in place. I tried that, but since I don’t get up and move around much, I quickly determined that I didn’t need to do that. You can see by the fuzz on the device that there is some grippy rubberized material on the Oska Pulse that is good for keeping it in place. All I had to do is prop the Oska Pulse on my shoulder, press the button, and let it do its thing until it beeped at me three times to indicate it was done.

After the fourth day, I started to notice a difference in my shoulder. I could pick up items heavier than a magazine or an empty toilet paper roll. People, this is huge: I already automatically lost the use of one hand because it was always occupied by the cane I had to use to assist me with walking. I can’t stress how bad this was, especially since only yesterday I got the last of my teeth replaced from all of those that I had broken in pain. I started being able to reach all the way over my head, and I was able to increase both my repetitions and the weights of my physical therapy exercises.

So after I saw success in my shoulder, I started moving the Oska Pulse around my body. This little guy was getting a workout! But that’s okay! The Oska Pulse stays charged for about 15 sessions, and then it needs another charge. The charger can be hooked up to a laptop or it can be plugged into the wall socket, as it has both capabilities. 2016-11-21-13-17-132016-11-30-17-18-36Here is the Oska Pulse in action, in the elasticized sleeve with the blue pulsing light on. You won’t feel a thing, truly. There is no buzzing, so the blue light will be the only way you know that it’s on. Are you shocked? You shouldn’t be! This is a device where taking away your pain will be completely painless. That is the best part about the Oska Pulse.

I didn’t tell my physical therapist about the Oska Pulse when I went in for a visit after not seeing him for a month. He was expecting to see as much improvement as he had seen the previous months, which was zero. Instead, he was stunned to see me lifting my hands over my head, bearing weight, and best of all, wearing an underwire bra that clasped in the back (previously the girls had been relegated to a sports bra that I could twist into with one hand that left them sadly sagging and flopping like I’m undeniably mid-40’s, which I am, and does nothing for me being able to attract potential suitors, even under false pretenses). My physical therapist was ready to doubt me or tell me to back down, stop being so enthusiastic, to slow my roll; but he nearly fell over with how well I was doing. He was stuttering.

This is a long post, but hang with me a little longer. I gave up my Oska Pulse, and potential pain relief for a time, because I wanted to know if it was just me. Was I just thrilled to get this product and was I blinded by the blue light?

I had given the team at Oska Wellness a heads-up that I might be doing this, but I gave the Oska Pulse to my sister for a test drive. I didn’t tell her much – only that she needed to charge it if it didn’t stay on for at least 30 minutes when she turned it on, and that she should wear it on spots that she was having pain. I gave her the instructions, the charger, the unit, and the stretchy band with the sleeve, and set her free. I did tell her that it worked for the COO’s dog when the dog was in pain because I knew that would tug on my sister’s heart strings – her dogs come with her to work every day, and we are all suckers for their love. If the Oska Pulse objectively worked for the dog, why couldn’t it work for us?

She made an effort to religiously wear it for two weeks, during which time we didn’t discuss the Oska Pulse at all. She didn’t tell me where she was placing it or how often she was using it. At the end of the two weeks I asked for it back and checked in with her. She had decided that she needed help with her neck. The easiest way for her to wear the Oska Pulse was to slip it into the flipped down hood of her hoodie – she didn’t even have to strap on the elastic band, and no one had to know she had the Oska Pulse going. She opted not to try to sleep with the device going and just deal with it during waking hours.
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Her conclusion: She has greater range of motion in her neck and less pain. She used it only on her neck and no other areas of her body. I’m not going to reveal her health conditions, but they are just as serious and chronic as any of my fellow chronic illness bloggers. I honestly don’t know if she’s going to be missing it in a few days, but I can tell you that I missed the Oska Pulse terribly while she had it, because pain started to creep back in. Now that it’s back with me, I pretty much have it duct taped to me – I’m not going to give it up again. I have it working on my right hip and the bursitis that has developed there.

Feel free to find out more info on their main website at Oska Wellness or on Facebook at Oska Wellness (Facebook).

Informational: A third-party, independent study showing that Oska Pulse can significantly reduce pain and improve mobility.

And isn’t it great when you can actually see that the Oska Pulse is clinically proven to reduce pain, like it is here in this study? It’s a double-blind clinical trial with a placebo! Super science!

Benefits of ordering a Oska Pulse device:
– Drug free
– No known adverse side effects (but please keep away from medical devices affected by magnets including pacemakers and adjustable shunts)
– Internal battery lasts up to 4 years
– 30-day money back guarantee!

NEW FOR JANUARY 2019:

The NEW Oska Pulse is now available for $399, but you may also use my coupon code of SICKDATING and get $55 off for a total purchase price of $344! Its running time is 90 minutes per session and it will run 20 hours before requiring recharging.

Also new for 2019:
I managed to develop CRPS (Complex Regional Pain Syndrome) in my right hand and wrist. They swell up quite large if I use them at all, even for simple things like grasping a page or two of paper. The Oska Pulse was successful in bringing down the swelling after only two sessions. Although it hasn’t cured my CRPS, I am using my Oska Pulse like crazy to help manage it.

Here is a video explaining and demonstrating the Oska Pulse!

Saturday Morning Thoughts About Friday Nights

Posted on by akiwifreund

Last night was a babysitting night for my nephews, ages 11 and 7, while my sister and her husband attended an art opening for a friend. I got permission to initiate them into the world of the musical “Grease” and all of its dirty references with actors who were very obviously not teenagers – the boys immediately picked up that Stockard Channing was “old” (33 when the movie was filmed). The 7-year-old said the actors were “creepy.” But they still got up and excitedly danced along with “Greased Lightning.”

I told my sister that if any questions came up about dirty jokes, she was getting all the queries. I didn’t want to get in trouble for giving them any answers.

Back in 1997 to 2003 I was living in Cincinnati, and during that time I worked in a very large law firm that expanded from 50 people to 350 people by the time I left. If you’ve never worked with lawyers, just know that they can drink. It was a great place for me to be really social. I did a lot of dancing. Sometimes I can’t believe that my Friday nights now are so different from 20 years ago. TWENTY YEARS.

We used to bring our going-out clothes to work on Fridays (if we weren’t already wearing them), and then all pile into the bathroom with our curling irons and hair spray and perfume and body glitter and high heels and makeup. We were a core group of four but sometimes there were more, and we’d rent a hotel room to stay in so we wouldn’t drive home drunk. If there were 8-10 of us, the hotel room would only end up being $10-15 downtown for a decent room, and maybe even a suite with a living room and pull-out couch.

One of the nights that we had a larger group for a friend’s birthday, there were 10 of us total, and four people got two bedrooms, and the rest of us were out in the living room. Two of the girls were doing full body barrel rolls over one of the guys on the floor. Now, let me tell you that I have no idea how we got this guy to party with us, but we did. He was younger and he worked in the mail room next to our area and we built up a good rapport with him, and he was fucking hot. There’s just no other way to say it. He was hot and he had a big, tight body with muscles everywhere, and we all wanted to jump him. So at the end of the night my two friends were rolling around on the floor with him, and I was sure that at some point it was going to be a threesome and I was going to have to pretend to look away. Unfortunately for them, it didn’t happen. A few days later one of them whisper screamed to me that he had the biggest penis she had ever had the pleasure of bumping into and she might have been a little scared if she would have been sober. I was a little sad that no one deflowered the mail room guy. It was some sort of male dance review fantasy.

Every time we went out I managed to play kissy face with some random stranger. I’ve been accused of putting out a scent, but maybe it’s because I just shake my ass when I’m dancing. One time on the dance floor I was minding my own business when a guy who was exactly my height started dancing with me and immediately put his hands on my shoulders and started pressing down really hard. Maybe I was bouncing around too much? He was really drunk and it’s possible he wanted the world to stop spinning. My friends were watching this happen. They said they could see the instant that my face changed from “I’m going to see where this goes” to “Oh, HELL no!” After he succeeded in immobilizing me, he tried to suck my face off with his lips. I couldn’t move my body away from him, only my neck. Back, back, back went my head like a chicken, and his lips kept stretching forward like a cartoon. I finally pried his hands off and climbed over my friends to get to the corner of the booth and he eventually went away after he couldn’t figure out how to find me again.

A bunch of the bars in the Over the Rhine area of downtown Cincinnati change ownership and themes often, but back in the late ’90’s the popular ones were Banana Joe’s (a chain that some of you might remember in other cities) and a ’70’s disco place called “Have a Nice Day Cafe” and one of those light-up disco dance floors. I remember that some dumbass maced someone else on the dance floor and the whole bar had to be evacuated one night, and all of us were teary-eyed and gagging. It was not “nice.”

Banana Joe’s had $1 rail drinks from 5 pm to 9 pm, so we would race from the firm to get there as soon as possible and pound down those drinks before they became full price, and to dance before the floor got packed. I was often the first one on the floor. I can still hear my friend saying, “There go her hips!”

One night in particular we had a bigger group of about 7 meeting up for drinking and dancing, starting early as usual. It included a gay couple and it was on a chilly night; we were all partying on the cheap and there wasn’t a coat check, so we just piled our coats in the corner by the DJ booth and danced near it, per the usual. On that night, though, there was a guy who was coming up to all of the girls and humping all of us in a distasteful way and wouldn’t take no for an answer, so we were throwing him dirty looks and edging away from him – and further away from our coats.

Dumb move. Not much time lapsed when one of the guys noticed that the nice $700 leather coats he and his boyfriend owned had been stolen by the obnoxious guy. We looked at the front door and the guy was on his way out. We girls were pissed! We shot out the door and yelled at the doorman to ask which way the asshole went, then we split up – two one way, two another. We circled the building, running to catch up, and by the time I did with the person I had paired up with, the other two girls had already pounced on the loser and retrieved the two jackets. They had seen him slinging them into a dumpster when he was taking off down an alley. They were yelling at him and he was holding up his hands as if he didn’t know what they were screaming about, then he slinked off into the shadows. We celebrated a little the fact that we kicked ass while the boys waited inside to see if they would ever get their jackets back.

I think about my Friday nights now, when I have a few hours with my nephews, or when I am looking for some diversion on Netflix or Hulu or Amazon. I’m so glad that I embraced every opportunity to be social, that I chased after an asshole who stole my friends’ coats and nothing bad really came of it, and that all of us survived the Friday nights.

I realized, just this moment, that every generation thinks that they are the ones that discovered wild. That’s not true at all. My nephews are going to figure that out too. They have no idea what their parents did or what I did because they think of us as the adults that are pretty quiet on Friday nights.

Can You Repeat That?

Posted on by akiwifreund

The last couple of weeks of December were a revelation.

I spent 20 years away from my family over the holidays, and I learned very early not to make a big deal out of the days we had off in November and December. When I’ve had serious boyfriends and we’ve lived close to their parents or grandparents, I’ve ended up at their houses, but if not, I’ve stayed at home and cooked whatever I’ve wanted to eat and overloaded on movies. A few times I’ve gone to friends’ houses – and one time that I did that, bringing my most recent ex with me, is a story still told today. My friend’s mom introduced us as, “Hi everybody, this is Chelsea, and this is ______, and they used to be boyfriend and girlfriend, and now they’re not, so I don’t know.” This was about 18 years ago, and when I reminded my friend, she started reminding her mother, and her mother finished the story, so yeah, it’s still fresh in her memory.

This holiday season really felt like a roller coaster. I received the results from the upright MRI. Just a few days after that, I received some medical records from a doctor I had seen one time for 20 minutes in August of 2015 when I was trying to find a primary care doctor who would take me on as a patient. I remember this one visit because the doctor had been so friendly, but I knew she was struggling with understanding the complexity of my conditions, and I had to repeat some information. I carried my previous records with me but she wasn’t interested in looking at them, she just wanted me to tell her again.

I was relieved at the end of the visit because it seemed like she was willing to take on the basic care like ordering my thyroid and cholesterol labs for my Hashimoto’s stuff. But then a week later I received a call stating that I had to find a new primary care doctor because she left the practice – she received notification that she passed an exam for a different field. I was floored. If you’re anticipating leaving, why take on new patients??

But the real kicker is getting her notes from that 20-minute visit now. Because I had to repeat myself, she wrote that I was “bragging” about my surgeries, and that I had Munchausen’s.

It’s really hard to read that in the same week that I received results saying that my brain has literally collapsed and I have tissue growing like a tumor and doing damage to my memory and speech. (Today I couldn’t remember why I called the county regarding picking out a vendor for medical assistance.) I still have a hard time talking about what’s going on, to get the words out. It’s serious. What’s happening is that the pressure in my cranium keeps rising, and it’s going to keep rising until it’s the same pressure as my blood pressure and I have a massive stroke and die. The two methods they have of treating it don’t work for me. First, the medication to reduce the CSF production has been proven not to make any difference for me. It’s been tried multiple times. Second, implanting another shunt isn’t going to work; I’m allergic to them all. I’m now at the point where I clog them and strangle them within days. I simply don’t have options at this point.

I also just got notes from a neurosurgeon from the University of Minnesota that I saw a year ago, from one of the guys I have nicknamed the Three Stooges. He was one of the three doctors who saw my MRI from July 2015 that had the beginnings of the slit ventricle syndrome and a smaller version of the tumor, and observed my fatigue, vertigo, facial droop, unsteady gait, and resolution of some of the symptoms when I tilted my head to move the fluid around. In my file he wrote that I “walk with a cane and can’t perform a tandem walk” but that I’m “fine.” He also stated that if anything changed, they would welcome me back to the neurosurgery department.

Fuck that. He’s not going anywhere near my brain when I’m unconscious. He obviously can’t handle it.

But the one bright light in all of this swamp of shit was that on December 27th, I received a voice mail from a case worker with the State of Minnesota. She simply stated her name and said that she approved my case for disability. As soon as I heard it, I immediately burst into tears. Being approved by the state doesn’t mean that I receive any kind of financial compensation, but it does assist me when I’m applying for housing – I can officially state that I’m disabled – and I also qualify for medical assistance as a disabled person instead of just a person living at or below poverty. It will also help to make my case stronger when it comes time for my hearing with the federal case, which I still don’t have a date for yet. My attorney thinks it’s still “some months” away.