When it began

I don’t even know how to attempt to summarize what we have been experiencing as a family. But, I will try. This may be long. 
We started noticing some things going wrong in the fall of 2013. Tim was starting his third semester at LHU. He found a group of students to go running with about three times a week. This was normal for Tim, as he was very active. In high school, he was on the cross-country, basketball, volleyball, and soccer teams. Not to mention, he was in the active-duty Marine Corps for five years. The end of his active-duty requirement was reached in August 2012. In the Marine Corps, he took part in activities like: going on hikes or “humps” for miles carrying heavy packs, running for miles, swimming, running with a log (the size of a shortened telephone pole) on his shoulders (with other Marines helping–but still a difficult thing to do), MCMAP (Marine Corps Martial Arts Program) training, PT (physical training) every day, combat fitness test (CFT) and physical fitness test (PFT). Tim also rode his bike regularly until the end of the 2013 fall semester. He received his bike from his awesome wife for his birthday, soon after we moved to Lock Haven. He started coming home and saying several times a week “I fell off my bike today” and “When I tried to run, it felt like I was running through a swamp”. I just sympathized at the time, being a college student and former Marine that had to be humiliating. We both just figured it was from lack of exercise. I did find it odd, but I didn’t think about it much more.  Then, around Christmas time, we started noticing that when he would get down on the floor to play with our 9-month-old son, he had a really hard time getting back up. It would take him about five times as long to get up than a normal person. However, when we thought back to when this could have started, we recalled some things being “weird” towards the end of his time in the Marine Corps. He wasn’t able to keep up physically, and they were worried about his weight gain. They said that he had sub-clinical hypothyroidism. We could date the slow progression back to late 2009, toward the end of his Mediterranean, which is when we started “dating”. I guess dating me broke him down. 😛

Tim was at a VA check up mid-January when we mentioned his weakness to Kathryn Wilt, his PCP. She performed a strength test with him, where he had to resist her and push against her, arms and legs. Kathryn is a petite and small-framed woman. He couldn’t hold her off as much as expected. It shocked me. She was concerned about it and decided it was worth looking into. So she got us in touch with the Pittsburgh VA and Dr. Clemens.