My body is actually doing really well right now. I’ve gone several nights without using a sleep aid beyond melatonin. I even had a nice normal bowel movement on Tuesday morning.
The trial run of Trulance, which gave me diarrhea for about 4 hours each day for 7 days straight in early October (except when I had to hold it for a haircut – then I got constipated), did not meet my criteria for success. And afterwards, I was just feeling worse and worse, not just in my abdomen, but overall. I caught some kind of cold, but it wasn’t that bad.
But I was pretty sunk in a malaise. I started thinking about how I’ve been diagnosed with a functional disorder, and what that really means. Something is wrong in the flow of my digestion. Something that makes me hold on to fecal matter until it gets hard and difficult to pass.
Instead of asking myself what was wrong when I had signals from my belly, I asked my body to let things flow. I rephrased it from pain to sensation. That doesn’t always work, but it can help.
I guess I’ve made the turn from looking to medicine to “cure” me to looking to my mind to “heal” myself. I’m not trying to deny science here, or disrespect medical professionals. But they honestly do NOT know what is going on with my digestion. My symptoms fit a pattern, and all they can do is try to treat symptoms. There’s no ferreting out a root cause.
At my last appointment, the doctor asked me several times about getting exercise and being out in the sunshine. He was, to me, clearly conveying that my issues had a psychological or mental aspect. Though he also said, several times, that I am not crazy. Yeah, dude, I know that. I’ve known crazy, and it ain’t me.
But not being crazy doesn’t mean that my mental state won’t affect my physical state. Our bodies and minds are tightly interwoven. One cannot exist without the other (not yet, anyway, insists the scifi fan in me). I remember hearing at some keynote address at a conference an idea that has stuck with me.
When one is nervous, one might feel butterflies in the stomach. If one names that feeling anxiety, it feels awful. But if one were to name it excitement, then the feeling is transformed into a positive one.
It’s nearly the one year anniversary of my mother’s death. In less than two weeks, I will be at her memorial, celebrating her life. I have some anxieties about the whole event, from seeing my extended family to actually mourning her with my family. I’m not going to bottle them up. I’m going to emotion my way through and allow myself to feel what I feel.
No swallowing those emotions and letting them interfere with my body’s function. Not while I’m finally starting to feel better.
I rather think that the diarrhea from the Trulance might have been a positive. I certainly felt empty after it was over, and maybe that’s what I needed to start again.
I’m still getting some intermittent intense sensations in what seems like the regions of my ovaries, but that is likely painful, but harmless, cysts. I will trust that my body will tell me if I need to do something more about them.
Maybe if I repeat that enough times to myself it will work. I figure it has as much of a chance as anything else I’ve tried. And it’s cheaper.