There are many things that happen in the course of the day for an Autism or Special Needs family. Frankly, things move so fast that it can be very difficult to keep up. Speaking for myself, it feels like I spend most of my time, running around putting out fires.

It’s even more difficult when the other parent is chronically ill because life becomes infinitely more complicated in pretty much every way imaginable.

Lizze is dealing with lots of health issues; most impactful are those related to her chronic pain. She’s made tremendous progress over the years and there’s hope that things will continue to improve.

The reality is that living with things like Ehlers Danlos, fibromyalgia and chronic migraines can’t possibly be understood unless you’re loving it first hand. You wake up in pain. You spend your day in pain and if you’re lucky, you fall asleep at night, but still in pain.

We have been working very hard on helping Lizze with everything that can actually be helped. There are some things that cannot be made better but by focusing on the things that could possibly be improved, we can increase her quality of life.

One of the things that can be addressed is her knee. Her knee is in pretty bad shape as a result of a gymnastics injury when she was younger. We recently had her to the Cleveland clinic and at first it looked like it would just require PT and meds but no surgery. That’s great. She wanted to get PT started right away.

However, after we got home, she received a message from her doctor and it explained that after looking at her X-rays taken minutes before her appointment, she’s got more serious problems than initially thought. Lizze was concerned that she would be unable to do physical therapy because she might need surgery now.

There’s a bit of confusion over exactly what the extent of the damage to her knee is but we won’t have to wait long to find out. She sees her specialist on Wednesday afternoon and we’ll get everything cleared up.

Having said that, she was told that she can go forward with PT and we’ll discuss more at her appointment. Lizze was able to schedule PT for the middle of next week. I know it may not seem like a huge deal but I’m choosing to celebrate this as a victory because PT will help her strengthen and make some progress. If she does need surgery, it will also help her be better prepared for that. 👍🙂