For the past couple of years I have been dealing with a steadily shrinking supply of energy and I had no idea why. Between April of 2016 and 2017 I held down a part-time job as proofreader, which was a great source of pride and self-confidence, but also left me really tired at the end of each 4-hour day. I fell behind on keeping the flat clean. I signed up for a swimming pool and never went. My husband and I had to move house suddenly just as my contract was expiring. With the help of family we found and moved into a new flat, in a different administrative area. My employment support people had a person there, then they didn't, then they weren't covering that area any more. I had more and more trouble getting to do even the most basic household maintenance tasks. I assumed the disruption to my schedule had brought my depression back out, and signed up with a lifestyle coach to try to find ways of getting more excercise and eating better. But I just couldn't manage to make any changes stick. Then there were my digestive issues. My gut was giving me pain spikes soon after eating. They were not pleasant but brief. I'd been popping over-the-counter meds regularly after lunch back at the job. I found that lactose gave me really bad diarrhea so I made changes to my diet to cut it out. That helped for a while, but when I came back from Christmas with the family in 2017, the pain was getting so bad I was barely eating anything. I was always exhausted. I couldn't live like this. You can check my fishing for sympathy thread for the play-by-play of medical adventures. tldr: I have Crohn's Disease. My large intestine has been steadily getting inflamed and losing its ability to absorb nutrients, and I have effectively spent the last couple years very slowly starving. I got my diagnosis on Wednesday, April 18th. We discussed treatment options and I got sent home with a prescription for Prednisolone, a steroid that would fix the immediate problem of inflammation in the colon. I started the course of pills on Friday, the 20th. The past two weeks have been a new and wonderful life. I can eat things without pain and digest them properly. Food is wonderful and I love it. I am so full of energy there is literally no mental gap between "I want this thing in my house to be clean" and "I have cleaned the thing". I have rediscovered a deep love of cooking, of preparing, of researching and experimenting and tasting. For the first time in a long while, I am enjoying being myself, and do not want a respite from it. Crohn's is what you call a chronic disease. No cure, but it can be managed. Basically I will have to keep an eye on Immune System to make sure he's not bullying Digestive System. But there are meds, there are treatments, and most importantly, I know what is going on now. With two weeks of proper nutrition behind me, I can look back at the past two years and go "holy shit, that was not okay". I was living in a fog of constant exhaustion and pain, and the worse part was the nagging feeling that if I could just try harder, if I could just eat better and work out more, I could fix this. I could not fix it. I never could and it would be ridiculous to blame me. The best course of action I had available was the one I took, going to my GP and telling them fiber supplements were not working and I was passing blood and I really needed to get tests done to figure out what was wrong with me. So how do I choose to feel about that, in retrospect? Vindicated. I feel sweet, sweet vindication for every moment of kindness and self-care. Every moment I told myself "all right, you're still exhausted, I guess that means you need rest". Every time I refused to blame myself for not doing a thing, and believing myself when my body told me I was just... *not* up to it. Every time I stayed in bed or played a video game and just *allowed* it. Every one of those moments was the right thing to do. Every one was the best thing I could have done at the time. And it's thanks to all those moments of self-kindness that I am here, now, at the start of a new life, full of new energy and poised to do All The Things.
