Snap Krackle 'n Pop!: April 2013

The Way of St. James - the Pilgrimage of a Lifetime

I've been planning a trip to Santiago de Compostela for years. I think I might finally be able to get there this spring.

I think it's urgent that I get there now. The time has finally come for me to visit. But why the haste?

For years, I've dealt with extraneous fatigue and sleepiness. I can't remember any time in my life when I wasn't super tired and sleepy. After innumerable visits to doctors and a rigamarole of medical tests, I was finally diagnosed just two weeks ago with a condition known as ocular mysthenia gravis (OMG). Oh my God, is right! Ocular myasthenia gravis is an autoimmune disease where antibodies present in the body seek to destroy and weaken precious muscles so vital for everyday living. This illness causes extreme fatigue and sleepiness to the point that a person would be content to sleep forever and never want to get out of bed. Yet I force myself to get up every morning, do my routine exercises - a combination of yoga, stretching, and physical endurance and also meditate and pray then bravely tackle what life has in store that day.

MG, the full blown myasthenia gravis, eventually destroys all body muscles and renders the patient useless to do pretty much nothing. One can no longer go about their everyday business like one used to, and in many cases patients are either bedridden or in a vegetable like state until the end. The disease is progressive and there is no cure for it. There is medication to halt the progression, but no known actual cure. MG might be derived from other illnesses such as multiple sclerosis, lupus, or other degenerative autoimmune diseases that eventually claim your life. One named celebrity to succumb to the illness was Aristotle Onassis, whose lungs eventually gave way.

Not everyone who has OMG develops the full blown MG. Studies show that a person who has endured OMG (ocular) for more than three years might never develop MG. How lucky would I be if that were my case.

So why the need to visit Santiago de Compostela? Santiago de Compostela is the journey of a lifetime! Actually it's the pilgrimage of a lifetime! And if I'm going to be limited to what I can do, I want to be able to make one last pilgrimage while I still can. And I chose the Way of St. James. I've visited Nuestra Senora de la Guadalupe in Mexico, Fatima in Portugal, the Vatican, and Jerusalem. There are other famous sites to visit, but St. James Way is at the top of my list.

One of the more frustrating symptoms of OMG is double vision. For close to ten years I've had to deal with the annoyance of diplopia. Not so much seeing red, but seeing double. A first the double vision was rare and sporadical, but as time went by it continued to worsen, until the beginning of this year, when my mother got very sick with stomach cancer and passed away in less than two months.

It's somewhat difficult, not to mention embarrassing to look at people straight in the eye when you're seeing two of them and not knowing which one to look at. Or, looking at them in a freakish or odd way. On a good day, it's hard enough driving down a scary, curvy mountainous road in the center of Puerto Rico, late at night. Or fighting your way through midtown traffic in Manhattan. But in addition, when one has to deal with double vision on top of it, it's one hundred times worse.

Do I want to wear an eye patch or special prism lenses (like the ones Hillary Clinton has been wearing lately)? Call it vanity for now. Or denial that my precious temple of God could be vulnerable to such an ill disease (no pun intended). But it might just come to that exactly. Unless they find a cure for MG, the only way for me right now is medicine (mestonin three times a day), rest, and hope. And, the Way of St. James, at least for now. Only the future and God know what's in store for any of us. I am just extremely grateful that I don't have a cancerous brain tumor or other rare illness with no hope of survival. For now I am content to deal with this prognosis. It could always be so much worse.

So on to the Way of St. James!