Introducing myself, I am a 61 year old woman (in 2003), a retired patent agent. I feel fortunate to be retired, and can’t imagine how those younger than I can manage a job and family, and get the rest needed to recover from RHS. Although several hobbies and volunteer jobs keep me busy, my schedule is my own. I am married with two grown children and five grandchildren, and live in Massachusetts, US, in the greater Boston area.

Rob suggested I start a diary of my Ramsay Hunt experience. Unfortunately, this was about 2 ½ months into my illness, and my memories of the early days were a bit foggy. A good reason to start a diary as early as possible! I sent an e-mail to my family, friends, and prayer partners to see if there was anyone out there who is not as diligent as Hubby and I about cleaning out old e-mails. Thanks to our less compulsive friends, this diary is much more detailed than I had feared! I have included some quotes from these e-mails, since they give a better sense of just how shocked and confused we were when this illness hit.

Preparing this diary was a lot harder than I thought it would be. I would think I was finished with a time period and start in on the next one, then something that I remembered from that new week would trigger another vein of thought, so I would start again back at the first week and insert everything related to that thought all the way through, and so on. I remembered more and more as I worked on it! And it was good to remember. Things were happening so fast at the beginning, and I was so overwhelmed, that I never really "processed" events in my mind and came to terms with them. Writing this diary has certainly been a learning experience!

The more I read of other people's descriptions of the onset of RHS, the more I realize how much stress contributed to my illness as well. For example, from the first of the year to early March, 2003, my daughter-in-law was on total bed rest with a difficult pregnancy...her 4th...then had immediate post-delivery surgery. So Nana got to take care of Mama, 3 little kids, housework & laundry for my son's family while Hubby held the fort here at home. Also, our new grandson had some preemie issues to overcome, which worried us very much for several weeks.

Then my mother, a true pack rat and daughter of the original pack rat, finally sold her house, the house in which she was born. My siblings and I got to comfort Ma, help her settle some financial matters, and clean four generations worth of 'stuff' out of her house. Cleaning out the house included finding buyers for most of her furniture, as well as rummaging through a squirrel-infested attic, sorting a lot of junk from precious family treasures. All this had to be done with a firm deadline of October 30. We finally finished, turned the keys over to the new owner, and got Ma on her way to her home in Florida on Oct. 24. The weekend before that, October 16-18, Hubby and I had houseguests, in the middle of the most rushed two weeks I can ever remember. I didn't realize it but, by the time Ma left for FL, I was experiencing the early symptoms of RHS, and was hospitalized three days later.

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