Eighteen years, eight months and five days she was here. Eighteen years, eight months and five days she's been gone.

Bizarro world

Several weeks ago, my arm started hurting. It wasn't constant, but it was really painful. It was like the muscle was on fire and affected either the muscle just above my elbow or just below, but never both at the same time. On the right side. I'd had something similar not long before the whole badness with my innards started, except it was on the left side. It started and then, after several months, just stopped again, with nothing I could figure out as a cause.

When it happened before, I went to all sorts of doctors. I saw neurologists and rheumatologists and every other -ologist I could find. They gave me a whole list of things that weren't wrong with me, but not a clue as to what was wrong. I got a number of misdiagnoses -- someone said I had tennis elbow, which isn't even close to my symptoms. There was no injury or muscle strain or anything like that. It was a bit worse when I got stressed, but it didn't seem that stress caused the pain, just exacerbated it.

So when it started again, I was pretty upset. I was in some pretty severe pain and I knew there was nothing I could do about it. Some folks I talked to suggested minerals, especially potassium, so I made a point of trying to add more potassium-rich foods to my diet. I was taking a multivitamin with minerals, so I didn't think I needed to take much more.

Monday morning, just after taking my daily vitamin pill, I got to thinking about the previous bout with it. It occurred to me that I likely was taking a vitamin pill at that time, too, but ran out just as the whole intestinal thing started and I didn't bother replacing them. I had only started taking the vitamins again relatively recently. Then the strangest thought came to me. What if the vitamins were causing the pain?

I've not taken the vitamins since and the pain is almost completely gone. I've had a couple of twinges here and there and it's sort of generally sore, but not the excruciating fire that I had before. Jim thinks that maybe it's the minerals that were included so, once this is completely out of my system, I can try taking vitamins that have no minerals included. Then I can start adding things one at a time. At least if I get that pain again, I'll know to stop taking whatever I added most recently.

But how bizarre is it that a vitamin pill would cause this kind of pain? Weird!