Personal History, Part 5

As my first official blog post of the new year, as I got my last one done just under the radar, it seems sort of fitting to finish up the Personal History posts. That way, with the weekly posts I put on here, I'll pretty much always be up-to-date on what's going on in my life.


So I finished my mission in August 2011, taking a couple days' worth of flying to make it back to the United States. Transitioning to "real life" again was… not easy. I mean, I had a less than a couple weeks after I came back before the school semester started up, and I was pretty much thrown into everything that was going on here. I went to live with my sister Katie and her family, which was great, and I was associating with people my age in a setting that wasn't me preaching about my beliefs, but…
If you ever meet an LDS missionary who's just getting back from their mission, and you ask them if they would have stayed there instead of coming back home, even if it was their assigned time to return, nine times out of ten they'll respond saying that yes, they would have stayed. A mission truly is a life-changing experience, and getting to help so many people in so many ways doesn't really have an equivalent. There are so many things that I miss about my mission: the culture, the friends I made, the food, the feeling of knowing that you're doing good in the world – I can list so many more aspects of it that I'll never forget. But one of the biggest aspects was that I never had to worry about myself. About anything. Money was taken care of; we had a monthly stipend given to us, taken out of funds that we had used at the beginning to pay for it all in the first place. Our day-to-day activities were always related to helping other people, primarily through preaching the Gospel, so that was our "job," in a sense. Rent and utilities were paid for, from the same aforementioned funds. Health-wise, we had insurance that covered anything and everything that happened, including the time I sliced my foot open and needed stitches (long story, but if you ask me about it in person I don't mind telling it – see previous Personal History post for a picture).

Actually, there was one thing about my health that I got worried about for a while.

While I was working in a city called Carlos Barbosa, I started feeling this weird sensation in my head. I wasn't really sure how to describe it, and to this day I'm not even sure what to call it. Since I had only been in Brazil for about seven months, my Portuguese was still pretty broken, so the word I relied on to express how I was feeling was "tontura," or "dizziness." That wasn't really it, since I didn't feel like my head was spinning, or that I was light-headed, or that I felt like the world was spinning around me. But in any case, that was the word that I went with, and the way that I explained the sensation was that it was like I was hit in the side of the head with a baseball bat and had that feeling in my head. No pain associated with it, just that "dizziness." And that was the best I could do to plain what I felt. How it made me feel was something different entirely. I felt like I had to stop whatever I was doing and just make the bad sensation go away. Which is bad, because there was nothing that I did or said to make it come in the first place. I could be walking, I could be doing a service project, I could be sitting or lying down, I could be talking with my companion, I could be teaching a lesson, I could be completely silent – there never was a trigger, per se. And nothing made it go away, either. Which made me scared, because the counsel I received from the medical advisor of the mission, our mission president's wife, was that any time I was feeling these "dizzy spells" I should just go home and rest. That ended up becoming very frustrating to me, since the whole point of me being in Brazil in the first place wasn't to take it easy; I was there to work!
These "dizzy spells" happened almost daily, and sometimes would last for a couple minutes, sometimes for a few hours. And I just couldn't help it. It got to the point that I was transferred to a city closer to the large hospitals in the area for testing, and eventually the mission office to work as a secretary for a transfer to see if lowering the amount of stress would be effective. I don't know quite what did it, but eventually the "dizziness" subsided a bit and became more manageable, so I went back into the mission field and finished my mission regularly. The last test I did in Brazil attributed these "spells" to a rare kind of inner ear infection (even though they never actually saw one, they just said it must have been really deep) that caused episodic vertigo. I did some crazy tests while I was there: x-rays, an MRI, aural tests to make sure my hearing was okay, tests to see if I could follow lights accurately, and one test where they blew hot and cold air and water into my ear drums. None of those seemed to show any negative results, and the various medications they tried with me (including antibiotics and antidepressants) had no effect whatsoever, so their conclusion was just based on a guess more than anything else. But this lasted for a period of about seven months, and I was worried for a while that I'd have to leave the mission early.

When I finally did come back home after the full two years, I made the transition back to "reality" relatively quickly. But I don't think I did it all too well. I ended up dating someone I met from a job I got, but some things that I'd experienced from before my mission began to affect me in ways that I'd thought I'd left behind years before. Those things began to seep into the relationship I was trying to have and, to make a very long story short, I ended up saying something to this girl I was dating that made her upset. She went driving, which she was prone to do when she was upset, and on the night that she went she was hit by a truck and nearly died. Miraculously, she received help within minutes and was flown to Salt Lake for treatment. Due to the level of injury she had, and to prevent any brain damage, the doctors attending to her induced a coma, from which she didn't wake from for a few months. When she finally did wake up, she lost about six months of her memory from before the accident, and that included when she met me and all the time we'd spent together.

I don't talk about that story often, and prefer not to. But for the sake of the rest of the post, accurate context is necessary.

I went emotionally numb for a while. I just didn't seem to be able to focus on a lot of things, and that reflected in a lot of things in my life. I suffered in school, I ended up leaving the job that I was at (which is where I'd met the girl), I tried dating again but nothing happened that was long-term or that I committed to… And I didn't really recognize for a while, but those "dizzy spells" began to come back. I began to notice them a lot while I was working at a local Sonic, and I just started attributing them to stress I was feeling at the time.
I honestly didn't believe it was another "deep inner ear infection." Really? After doing multiple tests, putting me on an antibiotic and still not getting any results back from it? No. Wasn't gonna be that explanation again.
Thus started the process here of trying to figure out what was wrong with me. For the longest time I thought it might have been something in my head, something that the MRIs didn't catch. Because these weren't "dizzy spells" I was feeling. It was definitely something in my head. Something I felt. Something that merited a real explanation. I'd been going to counseling, both for the things from prior to my mission that I was dealing with and the girl who got in the accident; I took personality tests and attention tests to see if it was something like ADD or something linked to OCD or even depression; I took more physical tests, including another MRI and a couple EEGs. (Don't ask me what they stand for, I honestly don't remember at the moment. But basically the MRI was the thing where they stick you in a tube and scan the inside of your head using magnet technology. The EEG was where they glued wires all over the top of my head and monitored brain activity for a set period of time.)

And then I started doing some tests to measure how I slept. The first one I took home with me, and I set up a bunch of wires on my own including some around my chest and waist, some around my face, and one on my neck. Then a sensor on my finger to measure my oxygen level. This test was to see if I had something I'd only heard of, sleep apnea. I'm linking to the Wikipedia page here, but basically it's a condition that causes blockage of the airway while one sleeps. You're literally not breathing for some period of time, but you don't know it because you're asleep. I had no idea that I had it, even though it was suspected that I did since I'm infamous for being a snorer. (Apparently that's one of the big signs of apnea.) A couple tests later, including one where I try sleeping with a machine that's constantly blowing into my airways while I sleep, and I've been officially diagnosed with it. Not just sleep apnea, though; according to the doctor I saw yesterday, "severe" sleep apnea is about 30 of those blockages per hour while you sleep, and I suffer from about twice that many per hour. So I've got something like "extreme" sleep apnea, if it can be called that.
Being asleep while this happens, I had no idea that it was that bad, or that it was happening at all. But considering how long I've had this for, whenever it started, this could seriously have been affecting me and I just didn't realize it. So yesterday I picked up my CPAP machine (again, an acronym that I'll probably never remember what it stands for), which I'll be using pretty much every night from now on. This is basically what it looks like:

When I've got it on, I look like Christopher Nolan's interpretation of Bane, and I sound like Darth Vader. Thankfully, I'll only have to use it right when I'm going to bed, not all day long like I did once with one of the EEGs. It's going to take some getting used to, that's for sure, but this seems to be the solution to what's been going on for… well, years of my life now. My dad has been using one for a while now, and he's said that within a couple days of using it he felt instant relief in that he was much more awake and alert during the day. Here's to hoping that it'll have the same effects for me.

Now, while a lot of what I just wrote seems rather depressing, I don't want to come across as saying that I've only had bad times throughout the years. Obviously when I was on my mission I had a great time, and when I came back there were some experiences that I'm certain to remember for a long time. The Thanksgiving after I came home was one of the first times in a long time that my whole family could be together, and to celebrate that we travelled back to southern California.

From a photo shoot that a family friend did for us

I ended up switching majors, so now I'm studying film instead of animation at BYU, and loving it just as much.

At the final for one of our film classes, with an old buddy of mine, Christian Halversen

And I've become part of Divine Comedy, working behind the scenes and playing music/sound for them when needed. I could sing their praises here, but it'd be better to just watch the skits that are online (found in the link given) and let them speak for themselves. I will say that it's one of the greatest experiences I've had in my college career, and will always look back on it fondly once I've graduated and moved on from BYU.

Cast and crew of the 2012-2013 school year

I got to see my buddy Mike, my MTC companion, get engaged and married in 2012.

First time as a groomsman, and I think I did an okay job of it!

I've made some amazing friends in the ward that I'm in, and with them I could easily stay for a long time.

During a tubing trip over the summer

Impromptu Just Dance competition

At a murder mystery dinner for Halloween

Chick-Fil-A Appreciation Day, where dressing up as a cow got free food

From one of our many laser tag nights

I'm feeling optimistic about 2014. No, I'm not quite in the place that I'd like to be just yet, but I'm getting there, a few steps at a time.

No new movies yet, but in part that's because I'm working on the resolution to actually watch all the ones in my collection I haven't seen yet. Like last week, when I finally saw Young Frankenstein… Fronkensteen… watch the movie and you'll get the joke. Anyway, I think I got that one from the $5 bin at Walmart ages ago just because I was already a fan of Mel Brooks, who directed this one. I just never got around to it until last week.

Also, as another step toward getting my resolutions accomplished, I went with a friend of mine to the library today as she's got a pretty similar one to mine (to read a new book every month). I ended up getting two: Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis and The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown. The former I got because I've got another friend who had tons of good things to say about it, and having already read previous books by Lewis I'm sure I'd enjoy it as well. And the latter is another installment of the series about Robert Langdon, who is the main character from The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons (both of which have been turned into movies, so you've probably heard of them), so it'll be interesting to see what happens to him next.