Our original plan was for Mrs S to simply return to Japan to handle all of her mother’s legal and financial dealings, because there was a house at issue, then return to Los Angeles.  She left on the 16th of October and the intention was to return on January 7th, so that her mother could have one final New Year’s with her before she passes on into the next realm.  She has a brother who has been living here all along, and throughout the entire 20 years that my wife had been living in the United States, it was understood that since she handled their father’s end of life affairs back in 1998 when he succumbed to throat cancer and since he was her mother’s favorite, that he would be the one to handle their mother’s end of life affairs.  Things simply didn’t turn out that way.  We had noticed last year in her annual 10 day visit that she was talking a little slowly.  Mind you, Okaasan (Japanese for Mother), was always tough as nails, no joke nor exaggeration, believe me.  We would often joke that she might outlive us, she was so tough.

At first, we thought it was simply that she was just getting old, but upon arrival to Japan, Mrs S realized that her brother wasn’t very useful and Ma didn’t really like his wife or how either one of them handled things.  She was a normal size and weight, the last she was with us, even looked okay.  She’s 77, but today she looks 97, as she had lost an alarming amount of weight.  Because she’d been having trouble swallowing, she simply wasn’t eating.  My brother-in-law and his wife were pretty much just showing up with a bag of takeout food and leaving it behind for her to eat, which wasn’t happening at all because of her swallowing difficulties.

When Mrs S arrived to Japan and started going frequent doctor visits with her, she implemented a treatment program of tube-feeding Okaasan directly into her stomach, as well as administering her medication in the same fashion and feeding her actual healthy foods.  Ma, she always preferred to just eat bread and fruit, but now she can’t eat fruit because the whole thing changed her taste buds and she lost her taste for sweet things.  She still wants bread, as a true bread fiend, and I must admit that I loved her bread.  She used to make fresh bread frequently, but in the long run, flour products aren’t healthy products.  We still let her have a little bread on the plate, but she doesn’t actually eat it.  It’s just there to keep the peace, whether she touches it or not, and for the most part it just sits there.  Which is good, because she shouldn’t be having bread anyway, since we’re pretty sure that her daily nonstop consumption of bread was an active contributor to the worsening of her condition.  I’m not saying that ALS is exactly like MS, but as someone who’s been thriving with MS for 9 years, I must say that it was mainly my food paradigm shift that allows me to thrive, even though I enjoy fun foods from time to time, myself.  But I digress.

After my wife left for Japan in mid October, I was alone in Los Angeles.  She’d gone a couple times to visit Japan on short trips, but three months was going to be a lot for the both of us to handle, as it was been the longest we were apart in the 15 years that we’ve been together.  In the beginning, I must admit that my separation anxiety just made everything worse for my wife than it actually was for me.  I wanted to Skype every day, but it just wasn’t feasible and it put far too much stress on my wonderful Mrs S., that could have had a permanent negative effect.  So after a completely ruined 47th birthday, I came up with the proposal that instead of Skyping everyday, we would just LINE each other daily here and there and Skype only once in awhile, and you know what?  Not only did that do the trick, but it saved our marriage, in fact, and our bond grew so much stronger because of this agreed upon decision.  Thank you, LINE!

But it was in mid November when my wife Skyped me, tearfully asking me to come to Japan for anywhere from one to two years whilst we helped her mother through her end of days.  Now, before you go saying, “hey, Stephen Hawking kinda held on a long time.”  Sure, this is true, but that’s because there was a breather installed that did his breathing for him.  The mind remains in tact, usually, for the most part with most people.  But my mother-in-law isn’t like most people, in fact she has a bit of a death-wish, as a widow of 20 years.  The late, great, お父さん, passed away from throat cancer in 1998, and my mother-in-law had been alone ever since.  She refused the breather, so this truly is an end-of-days situation.  Now, mind you, I’d been working as a ride-share driver full-time for the past 4 years for numerous reasons that I won’t be getting into just yet, but something wholly unexpected happened on December 3rd that kind of changed everything.  I got into a car accident, that really put a dent into our plan.

MORE TO COME…

Some people think I’m crazy for saying this, but being diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis was the best thing ever to happen to me.  It was without a doubt, the single worst news I had ever received in the entirety of not only the 38 years before I was diagnosed, but the 9 years that passed since then.  I’ve had people that I loved dearly suddenly befall an untimely tragic death, or when my parents divorced when I was 14, both of which were emotionally heart-wrenching milestones of my life’s timeline, surely.  But compared to the first of a three doctor trifecta MS diagnosis, they were merely unfortunate events that just kinda sucked.  Horrible and devastating as it was, it was also liberating and empowering. But let me share with you what I went through in hopes that perhaps it can inspire you to take your life back too. Because after the initial shock, there’s the matter of taking your life back, not just from MS but from the doctors, from the insurance companies, and ultimately from your own previously conceived limitations and expectations.

The diagnosis process itself was a nightmare all its own because it seems like every typical doctor handles everything exactly the same way.  You come in and tell them what’s wrong with you and right away they start in with the drugs.  They don’t even necessarily know what’s going on inside of you or talk to you about what you have and haven’t been eating, your vices and habits, your disposition or possible stress sources that may or may not be contributing to your symptoms, and right away they go into the “let’s try this” routine and write up a script for your symptoms.  Not only that, but you’ll be put through the gauntlet as well. You’ll start with a general practitioner who referred me to an E.N.T. (ear nose & throat) specialist, whom referred me to a neurologist, before it was officially established that I have Multiple Sclerosis. By this time, the side effects of the smorgasbord of pharmaceutical drugs.  Steroids such as Prednisone for the pins and needles and whatever inflammation that was making me unable to tap my foot in an even rhythm nor play a piano scale two handed; motion sickness pills such as Meclazine for the incessant symptoms of vertigo I was experiencing; the nose sprays, Omnaris and Flonaise, for whatever polyps that the E.N.T., stated might be causing the absolute dentist injection level numbness on the entire right side of my face and head, and the injections of only God knows what directly into right side of my face to bring down the inflammation of the trigeminal nerve that might be causing my facial neuralgia.  You should’ve seen me, I was a wreck.  I was slurring my speech, getting double vision here and there, and couldn’t really function normally, not to mention that the steroids made me more than a little bit grumpy.

So, Mrs S, she says to me, “just humor me a little bit and stop using those nose sprays,” and I did.  Within 24 hours I was back to normal again. I was so irritated and frustrated that I stopped taking all the drugs and when my neurologist first attempted to treat me with yet another drug, I refused treatment for my first 10 months.  In fact, for the first year that I had MS, I had refused any kind of pharmaceutical treatment whatsoever.  I felt like these Doctors didn’t know dick about nutrition, didn’t even ask or anything, yet they wanted to treat me like a guinea pig and pump me full of all sorts of drugs based on conjecture and guesswork.  Well let me tell you something, this is why you should always know that no matter what television and media try to tell you, contrary to popular belief, doctors do not walk on water. I may have mentioned this on another post, but if you ever wanted to know just how badly you’re getting ripped off by your insurers and healthcare service providers, know that my wife accurately diagnosed me with MS before 3 trained and highly educated medical doctors, and my wife was an art major.  Let that little nugget sink in a moment.

I thought my life was all over, that I was all finished.  I thought that everything that I had ever dreamed of myself doing when I first came out to Los Angeles was never going to happen and that I’d end up alone in a wheelchair somewhere.  All sorts of emotions and memories can start racing through your mind when you get diagnosed with a disease that all mainstream medical professionals agreed is “incurable.”  I’d lived a lurid life before meeting Mrs S., sailing the seas of consequence since getting kicked out the Navy back in 1992 for smoking weed to mentally and emotionally process a major traumatic event that got 2 shipmates killed.  I’m not going to get into ten years worth of amusing Tarantino re-imagined Forrest Gump reboot anecdotes, but all I could think about was every skanky ass behavior, every nasty remark I’d ever made, every individual I’d ever hurt or made feel anything other than respected or liked.  In fact, every possible moment in which I had ever been anything other than a good and decent person raced through my head nonstop.  I couldn’t even think of too many moments, either, which took me down even further into a deep depression. I was crying almost all the time from October 2009 through about half of January 2010.

Mrs S., whom is like what you would get if you were to genetically splice Liz Lemon with Chloe O’Brien, and Daria, no exaggeration, truer words have never been written.  But she

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picked me up some books from Amazon, which I’ve observed is usually the first thing a lot of people do after they’ve been diagnosed with MS.  They pick up a bunch of books on Multiple Sclerosis because according to Rumor Control Central, it usually starts with the MS diets, of which we’ll go into detail along the way in subsequent posts.  But I kinda started out with the Swank diet, which of course started me on an anti-fat crusade that had us doing a lot of measuring and limiting my consumption of oils and fatty foods, which is a halfway decent place to start, sure.  But I was still dealing with all sorts of symptoms, too many to digress into details.  But when we purchased Healing Multiple Sclerosis, by Ann Boroch, on Amazon, my eyes had really opened to something that everyone forgets is slowly killing you 24/7, sugar.  I learned about how MS and a whole laundry list of other autoimmune conditions such as ALS, Fibromyalgia, Hodgekin’s Disease, Lupus, Leukemia, and Rheumatoid Arthritis, are directly or indirectly caused by Yeast/Fungal Overgrowth, particularly candida albicans.

MORE TO COME…

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It is now the my 20th day in Japan, and I just realized how remiss I have been in my blog-posting duties.  I told myself that I would be blogging more often, but so much had happened since I last posted that I feel there is a tremendous need to fully catch everyone up on what’s been going on since I last posted.  Firstly, let me apologize to those of you who’ve actually been reading my posts since I first started this blog.  To be more truthful, I started blogging long ago under Venomoftheday, but I’ve since made the mistake of attempting to add WooCommerce to my blog pages over and over again.  This mistake gave me the distinct pleasure of having the entire screen turn white and losing everything that I had previously posted.  Thus, I had to completely erase all of my previous work and start all over again.  This had happened with hotdogandbun.com/ericsandoval, hotdogandbun.com/venomoftheday, hotdogandbun.com/themanincorporated, and hotdogandbun.com/stuff, over the past few years.  I’d lost some of my best written material, yet I’m not a quitter, even if I admittedly am a slow mover.  I truly enjoy the written word, and though I tend to write more political and social commentary and criticism, my true passion is in fiction.  I’ve written four screenplays, developed a 13 episode series bible for a television drama about transnational criminal syndicates operating within the United States, produced around 20 stop-motion animations of which some are shared on this blog-zine, produced 2 live-action short films, and wrote a couple plays of which I have yet to get up on the stage.

But allow me to fill you in on what’s happened since I last posted.  Back in late August of 2018, my wife (whom I prefer to refer to as Mrs S.), and I received the news that her mother had been diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (A.L.S.), once commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease.  However, since most people nowadays don’t even know who Lou Gehrig actually was, (American professional major league baseball player, nicknamed “the Iron Horse”, who played for the New York Yankees for his entire 17 season career with 6 World Series under his belt, made All Star 7 times in a row, Triple Crown winner once, American League MVP twice, hit 493 home runs, was elected into the Baseball Hall of Fame, and was so chingon that he was the first baseball player to have his team number, #4 to be permanently retired when he retired from baseball), most people these days simply refer to it as A.L.S..  In fact, up until last year’s absurdly narcissistic social-medial self promoting Ice Bucket Challenge campaign on YouTube and Facebook, I only knew it as Lou Gehrig’s Disease, but I digress.  Once we’d received the news, my wife had to start making arrangements to return to Japan to settle affairs.

MORE TO COME…

Before the car accident which completely eviscerated my income altogether, leaving me with very little money, pretty much no money in fact, I had already started packing.  Mind you, with more than 40 free Home Depot boxes that I scored from a recently moved Angelino off a Craigslist post, I was tasked with packing up 15 years’ worth of me and Mrs S’s accumulated stuff.  Everything from clothes to books, oh my goodness there were so many books, to pots, pans, dishware, flatware, and a whole assortment of goods, items, musical instruments, completed paintings (more than 30, and more than half of them are big), and just about anything else you can think of, all had to be put into a 6.5′ x 16′ storage unit.

So, with no working visa, no bachelor’s degree to fall back on, I agreed to go to Japan, coming in and out back and forth from L.A., and toughing it out for the next two to three years.  Mrs S., came back for two weeks in January, whilst her mother was in a 2 week hospital observation period so that we could work on her paperwork with our Immigration Paralegal, and we traveled to Arizona to visit my father before I leave the USA for an indefinite period.  We’re currently working on a temporary spousal working visa, but not sure how that’s going to turn out, and that’s our situation thus far.  I have been here since February 1st, but I have to go back in March to be able to apply for another 90 days of my medication, which is a story for another post.  Mrs S will soon also have to return briefly the the United States for her biometrics.  On a brief side-note, I have to say that the United States government is being absolutely ridiculous in requiring her to perform a biometrics appointment simply because they already have her biometrics.  The United States government through the INS and DHS have had her fingerprints since 2004, and the last time I checked, not even deleted files are ever deleted.  Essentially, it’s just more bureaucratic nonsensical hoops to jump through so the government can make just a few extra bucks.  But I digress.  

With no income, a slightly injured back, and Lyft’s bullshit car insurance policy that eats the first $2,000 of any settlement, regardless of fault (some ignorant asshole Christmas shopping dickbag ran a red-light right in front of me), our car was settled out by Lyft’s revolting insurer at just over $6,000, $4,000’s worth went to paying the car off, leaving Mrs S., with a whopping $471.00 to spend on something nice. (sarcasm definitely intended).  We handled Mrs S’s green-card variation details whilst she was in town, knowing full well that within 3 months, we’d have to go backfor her biometrics.  But we got that ball rolling so she could go right back to Japan to get back to caring for her Mom, and I had to finish packing everything into storage and travel to Japan right after.  This all seemed to work out just fine, but we were called back to the USA to do her biometrics just 3 weeks after I had arrived to Japan.This threw a monkey into the wrench, because I had just received a 3 month supply of my medication (glatiramer acetate) and I knew that I’d have to not only wait for my medication but also for her re-entry authorization visa.

Now, for those of you out there wondering why my wife of 15 years isn’t a naturalized US Citizen, that would be because there is a house in question here in Japan, and why should she lose her inheritance just to be a US Citizen in a country that people lose everything just because someone in the family gets sick?  But I digress.  Point being, Japan does not recognize dual citizenship.  But there’s a lawsuit that we’re keeping a close eye on in hopes that this situation will change in the next decade, hopefully.

MORE TO COME…