I know. I just told you I had lowered my dose of Ascor.

You know, as you have been reading my blog, that injecting Vitamin C (Ascor) everyday has given me profound, widespread symptom relief for my crushing case of Hypermobility Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (new criteria).

I went from:

• Flat-out disabled

• In intractable pain

• Too sick to live my life

• On morphine everyday

to:

• Strong

• Exercising

• Sleeping

• Healing

• Traveling

• Off pain meds

• Able to live

• Back to work

Yay!!

Oral C did not do much for me, which is usually the first question I get. Why injected C makes such a profound difference when oral C does not is another mystery of hEDS.

Perhaps my genetic error causes my body to waste C, and injecting it into my fat gets around that on-going error, unburdening my body from hEDS.

Just my guess.

The human body should be saturated in C. If I am chronically deficient because my body is wasting it, that could account for the systemic, disabling agony of hEDS.

Just my guess.

Vitamin C is necessary to make collagen.

• I am not building proper collagen on Ascor. I am building much better collagen.

• I also sleep. I recover from sleep. I am not fatigued.

• I take no pain medication

  except naltrexone twice daily, which is not really a pain medication. I cannot recommend naltrexone highly enough. Start at the tiniest dose and work up to a big dose, kids, at least 10 mg. I take 50 mg twice daily. My brain loves it. More on naltrexone later.

• I am extremely active. I recover from exercise and build muscle.

• I am still very flexible, very soft and smooth. But now, from Ascor, my skin is much stronger, as I am, in every way.

My Medical History (Briefly)

I was born with abdominal hernias so severe, I spent the first two months of my life screaming until I had surgery to fix them.

I was a speedy, skinny, flimsy child who was always cold and ran out of energy quickly. I had painful stomach aches and I didn’t like to eat, unless it was cake frosting.

Once I hit age 13 and started to grow, I fell apart. My feet, my knees, and my low back blew up in pain so bad I could hardly walk. I became severely kinesophobic, afraid to be touched and afraid to move. I felt my fragility that I could not describe. Life was terrifying. Basic, everyday tasks overwhelmed me. Fatigue overtook me. After age 14, I could never again function like my peers. Not even close.

Fast forward, past all the misdiagnoses and charlatans and abusive medical treatment I suffered (you know, you’ve been through it, too) to when I was finally diagnosed at age 33.

Injecting me with C was something Dr. Plance tried in order to help me heal and recover since I was an epic failure at both and had no endurance and no quality of life and wanted to die because my life was an unlivable hell of agony, not because I was unhappy.

Injecting C was one of many things he tried on me, and the one thing that made a difference.

For years, Dr. Plance injected me with C sporadically, about once every two weeks. I felt better, even from that dose. Since that was not the only thing he was trying on me, we didn’t realize it was the C and the C alone that made the difference.

Finally, on a hunch, because many of the symptoms of Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome overlap with the symptoms of C deficiency (scurvy), I took some home and gave myself C shots.

The more frequently I gave myself C shots, the better I felt. Every week, then every three days, then every other day. Dr. Plance objected to me doing them every day (wouldn’t that be dangerous?). I told him I wanted to try anyway, and did it against his objections.

I began injecting C daily in December of 2012 and have done so ever since.

I am writing this in December of 2018.

By Summer of 2013, I was back in physical therapy, this time making progress.

By Summer of 2014, I was off Vicodin, Soma and morphine. Getting off long-term opiates was devastating to my health and a complete nightmare to recover from. More on that later.

You know, as you have been reading my blog, that injecting C opened the door to everything else making a difference. I needed to do tons of physical rehabilitation because I was so weak and flimsy. I needed a lot of time to catch up on sleep and heal, because the injected C was not a placebo. A placebo is something that gives a person an emotional boost of hope which provides relief. We all need hope. Placebos wear off.

I am told the lab test for Vitamin C deficiency is only available in a research setting, so I never have had it. But the human body should be saturated in C. Is this why we have so many debilitating problems? We do not hang onto C long enough to function?

Most mammals make their own Vitamin C, on demand. Wouldn’t that be handy! Get stressed out or sick, and your body churns it out and you heal fast. Unfortunately, humans (also guinea pigs and chimpanzees, if I remember correctly) do not. We must get C externally to survive. Darn!

C deficiency is diagnosed by symptoms.

For dosing Ascor, I only have my symptoms to go by. It’s all been a guess. Large amounts of C are not toxic, which is good news. Some people might be prone to getting a kidney stone from C loading, but this has not happened to me. Yay!

I had lowered my dose this year because those shots hurt! Ouch! But nothing is worse than being disabled, so whatever. Small price to pay. In fact, I would rather die than go back to my old life of agony, my life before all this C loading by injection.

I wanted to see what would happen, if I could get by with less.

Seemed like it was going fine.

Then…

This December, Mr. Pennington came home with the worst head cold, which I promptly caught, as he is hard to avoid.

When I start to feel myself getting sick, I always inject more C. It seems to help. Often I can breeze through a cold with only a light sniffle and a couple of tired days. I’m always trying to avoid pneumonia, which I have had more times than I can count.

This was a terrible head cold. I was so sick and so was he. The holidays marched on.

Mr. Pennington made beef wellington for our Christmas, as always. All ingredients we got at Trader Joe’s.

Mr. Pennington made a cardamom vanilla cake. The cake was awful, but the Italian meringue buttercream was out of this world. We threw out the cake and ate the frosting on brioche. By we, I mean just me, not him. I still love frosting.

Merry Xmas!

I woke up early the morning after Christmas to head to work. Happiness! Joy! Working! No one even knows I have this stupid disease! I am on my feet all day and I keep up with the collagen-typicals! I even have more energy than a lot of them! Many of them ache more than I do because they slouch and do not engage their muscles when they move. What a surprise to find myself so high-functioning! Yay!!!

When I looked at myself in the mirror on December 26, 2018, to put on my make-up after days and days of injecting twice as much C, like Narcissus gazing into the pond, I fell in love with the glowing beauty of my skin. From those extra C doses, my amazingly beautiful skin looked even more amazing. I said:

F*ck me! I look so good!!! OMG!!!!

Mr. Pennington agreed.

It looks like the extra shots of C are beneficial to my collagen. That’s all the evidence I need. 

Not looking older is super fun, especially because Ehlers-Danlos ruined my youth. I am not developing deep wrinkles or even lots of fine wrinkles typical of an EDSer, even though I spent my entire childhood in the sun without sunblock, swimming every single day after school, and all day at the beach in the summer, until I became too fatigued to hardly leave the house. But still that was tons of time in the sun. I should look very sun-damaged. Try not to be envious, normal people.

Vanity is a virtue. It benefits others, as they have to look at you. Looking awful is like littering. We should all try not to do it.

Then and there, gazing into the mirror, I decided to double my daily shots, one in the morning one in evening, from here on out.

I like this size of shot. It doesn’t hurt too much or leave me too sore, and the C does not dribble out from the injection site, which can happen with a bigger shot. But be warned, It burns like a motherf*cker, until you get used to it. Then it only burns a lot. Totally worth it. I want the best collagen I can make, and the most energy my body can have. I want to live my life.

I also want a buttercream made by Mr. Pennington, for my birthday or any holiday from here on out.