I am detoxing. No doubt. It’s a process of renewal, yet the roller coaster ride sucks.
During the past several weeks, that inevitable swirling vortex of life’s forces, both positive and negative, has picked me up and twisted my insides. But right now, I’ve found this moment of level headed inclination to unload here in my own forum as a means to hopefully help me process all this junk and be released from its clutches!
Releasing stress is a good thing, yes, but only as much as my ability to be honest with myself and acknowledge that I am not always more powerful than me. I have weaknesses, I make mistakes, and sometimes I need help. Help is something that I have had a tremendous problem with asking for all of my life. Even as a little girl, I lived vicariously through Linda Carter as Wonder Woman. Seriously I did! Behold the power of strong, kick-ass, independent women! But Wonder Woman I’m not, although it’s still fun entertaining in that thought (and hey, I’m darn close…I could like, be her little sister or something). And often times in keeping my sanity as I hold down this fortress and keep boundaries at bay within my domestic wild-wild west, it’s what I HAVE to do.
This is the curse of a woman. We want to take care of everything and everyone and in the process we forget about ourselves. So it IS okay that I’m actually human and should not feel guilty or weak for feeling overwhelmed, depressed, run-down, or not perfect. And stress is not always attributed to negative circumstances. Even the exciting, positive, and most fortunate things to which I’m deeply appreciative that have happened in my life lately stir up adrenaline and intermittently exhausting energy. Then the difficulty exists in how I perceive and handle it all, and most recently how I’ve allowed it to take me over.
Nearing the weekend of May 9, just in time for my husband’s birthday, I had a major Crohn’s attack. When I say “major”, it’s one of those that just kicks my ass into bed-ridden debilitation for several days, followed by an indefinite period of recovery and renormalization. The whole experience is not only painful and draining, it’s incredibly maddening due to havoc it wreaks on all the work I’d been doing for the good of my health. I am exhausted and cranky, and it takes my body a good while to recognize the balanced path it once rode and hop back on it.
Medically speaking, stress factors have not been “proven” to instigate the onset of a Crohn’s attack. Yet my own history and in speaking to others who suffer from Crohn’s and other forms of IBS suggest quite the opposite. It’s becoming more and more of a common knowledge that stress in its many forms can do some seriously jacked up shit to your body if it goes unchecked. Oh yeah, and although I have done lots of work in keeping myself healthy, I’ve slid a bit. Acute stress provokes me to eat crap and I ate just a hair too much cooked and restaurant food and had a little too much wine (DUH Jules!) in the previous weeks to this flare up. So, who is really to blame here? Me or my disease?
The cycle: busy > stress > eat out > bad food choices > too much wine > stress > CROHN’S ATTACK > painkillers > spaghetti > recovery > more painkillers + Excedrin > increase raw > hi-raw > detox > feel great again . . . busy.
So the good times routine begins something like this: within 24 hours of unbearable pain, I start on hubs’s oxycodone (Percocet) which he has for his own issues. Meanwhile, my wonderful hubby-nurse calls our doctor. The good Doc calls me in some scripts. As always, it’s for Prednisone (a steroid for the inflammation of the affected area of my GI tract) and hydrocodone (Vicodin) for pain. Well, it is easy to protest steroids. They are just wrong, period. BUT, it is even easier to become dependent on the painkillers. They are wrong too, but when you are in that much pain they quickly become the lesser of the two evils. And not only do they numb the pain to tolerability, they create feel-good mood sensations in the brain that want more once you get them continuously pumped into you.
After a couple of days, when my body finally embraces the idea of having a little nourishment, it’s a far cry from my beloved sea vegetable salads or green shakes. The last thing I think about is jumping back to where I left off. I become scared of food, even raw, even water. During this last experience, my husband made me a small portion of plain spaghetti as my first post-attack meal, the only thing that was appealing whatsoever and it did taste so good! Eventually being able to add a little tomato sauce was nice, too. I started to make a comeback slowly but surely, but my energy was down and I still had an aftermath of dull pain in my abdomen, accompanied by smaller relapses. So, I pop some more Vicodin or Percocet and it’s all better.
By day 3 to 4, I’m ready to get out of bed and begin the recovery process but my body is now completely out of whack. I have no energy in the morning, so I regress to another little bad habit I’ve been on and off with: Excedrin. They have caffeine cleverly mixed into the acetaminophen/aspirin cocktail that gives you a nice brain boost that’s lots better than coffee. Take some Excedrin and you can write a thesis in an hour and clean your whole house top to bottom in another! I’m also still not eating much, except spaghetti and other bland cooked foods, supplemented with Vicodin here and there. Do you see the vicious cycle here? As the week progresses, I feel better and better abdominally and I slowly incorporate raw foods again. However, it becomes a little challenging to ween myself off of the drugs that were carrying me along.
It has been 3 weeks now since the beginning of the last attack, and I’ve been eating hi-raw since Sunday with no painkillers and no Excedrin. Naturally, the detox process came on fast and intense. I’ve gotten quite comfy on the loo again, my magazine rack is stocked. I’ve got surprise little blemishes on my face and chest every morning. I get frequent little annoying headaches that say, “Just feed me two Excedrin!” and I say, “DO shut up!” My menses are off again as I am spotting mid-cycle. And at night I get weird all-over body sensations like heart palpitations and restless legs. That’s been my week this week.
At this moment, I’m trying so hard to stand still in the middle of this swirling vortex of my life. No worrying, no projecting, no what-if’s. I feel better now than I have felt in a month! And in just a short 8 days, I will be traveling virtually constantly for a month straight. I could easily let myself worry about things like:
1) Will our house be okay (even though mom-in law and our resident spiritualist will be staying here)? Will the kids drive them nuts and try to have wild parties?
2) Will a crisis occur to which we are not home to address?
3) How will I manage being raw and prevent a health crisis from occurring while I am on a cruise ship or in freakin’ Croatia?
But now, Julie, what is all that worrying going to do except add stress, therefore potentially beginning the cycle all over again? I have to stay present. Stay present. Stay present. Be grateful. Feel love, be love. Embrace light. Embrace health, once and for all.
<3, JMK
