Page 210 - South Mississippi Living - June, 2022

FINAL SAY
YEKATERINA
KARPITSKAYA, MD
Bienville Orthopaedic Specialists
How do doctors keep from getting sick? The simple answer is we don’t. Doctors and nurses get sick from time to time just like you do. Ironically, we dedicate our lives to diagnosing and treating disease, mostly through listening and synthesizing information from our patients, yet, sometimes, we fail to do that very thing for ourselves.
After 13+ years of education followed by a full-time practice – with long hours in the operating room, days and nights on call, and a perception of any sign of being human as a weakness – we ask a lot from our bodies and minds, forgetting to thank them for continuously giving so we could care for others. Until, one day, it all gets taken away from you.
I have always been a very energetic, driven person, burning the candle at both ends. On top of my demanding jobs as an Orthopaedic surgeon and mom of two kids, I also train for and race Ironman Triathlons in pursuit of the elusive Ironman World Championship in Kona, Hawaii. In the spring of 2019, as I was training for Ironman Texas, I became ill.
We had just returned from a triathlon training camp. I was busy rushing around the house, unpacking and cleaning and suddenly felt overwhelming fatigued to the point of having to immediately lie down. The next morning, I had a difficult time getting out of bed. Everything hurt, I felt stiff and had a strange rash on my legs. I chocked it up
to overtraining, and maybe a viral infection, and loaded up on oral steroids, hoping the symptoms would resolve before my race. I drove to Texas, still hoping that I’d wake up my normal self, but I only got worse and had to pull out of the race. This was the beginning of the two-year betrayal by my body and the battle I’d find myself in, searching for a diagnosis and cure.
After a few months of trying to self-medicate, I decided that I should stick to fixing bones and seek help from Dr. Nicole Walton, a local rheumatologist. She suspected an autoimmune process and started me on some medicine. I felt somewhat better and was able to pull myself through Ironman Florida in November 2019, securing a spot in Kona; however, the tremendous stress of it all caused a bad flare-up and, feeling discouraged, I stopped the medicine.
As I frantically tried to figure out what is happening to me, I went for a second opinion, and then the third at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester. At the Mayo Clinic, I was seen by an elderly rheumatologist, who told me that “I am just getting old” and need to slow down. I did not give up. As traditional medicine did not seem to give me answers, I educated myself on alternative medicine, naturopathic medicine, meditation, bio- hacking, Lyme Disease – I even hired a health coach, changed my diet, and took hundreds of supplements. After two years, I was beginning to accept that this might be my new normal, and I was truly “just getting old.”
By fall of 2021, my condition had gotten so bad, I could barely walk around my neighborhood or get through a day of work. I reached out to Dr. Walton again, who has always been there for me, always sympathetic and caring, listening to my ramblings and hugging me as I cried in her office, frustrated with my circumstances. We re-checked labs, and finally, we had a diagnosis: lupus. She started me on new medication, and four months later, the symptoms gradually faded away and became manageable. I cautiously started training again, and even more cautiously, racing triathlons. Today, three years to the day, I finished Traditions Triathlon with a personal best.
This experience has been very humbling, allowing me to experience what it’s like to be on the other side of patient care. The journey has shown me that often times, female patients in particular are not heard and often dismissed at just being “menopausal,” emotional, their symptoms minimized, and/or labeled as “fibromyalgia.” I am now much more aware of the association between musculoskeletal pain, nebulous systemic symptoms, and autoimmune disease. I have learned how to better treat the patient as a whole, rather than just a body part,
how to think outside the box, and that “when you are
a hammer, not everything is a nail.” I will be forever grateful to all the physicians that helped me through this process (you know who you are).
210 | June 2022
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