Pre-Surgery and Re-doing tests

With the aid of all of the medications I was taking i.e. prednisone, salofalk and immuran etc. I was finally in remission.  Hallelujah!

But it didn't last for very long. Each time I tried to wean off of the prednisone I would get down to 10mg or so and the Crohn's Monster would flare up again.  This went on for a while and it was really disrupting my life.

Finally my Gastro and surgeon came up with a plan.  We had tried the medications for two years, and it wasn't helping so it was now time for a surgical intervention.  This is a picture of my pre-surgery tummy, never to be the same again.  I was to be hospitalized through the weaning process, taking me down as low as was possible in order to have a bowel re-section, my first one.  There were also many tests to be run and it was easier for scheduling them as an in-patient, they were done faster than if I was at home.  The picture from my last post with the TPN was taken during this hospital stay.

As the weaning process went on I became much sicker and was in tremendous pain.  I had been in the hospital for a while (again on the geriatric ward, but a private room this time, no one wanted me to lose another room mate again) and requiring pills and shots for the pain.  My doctors didn't want my body to build up a tolerance to the medication since I would really need it after the surgery, so I was given the old "don't take the shots unless it's absolutely necessary" talk.  That didn't bother me at all.  I wanted them to work when I needed them too.

One of the tests I was to have was a Barium Enema, or a Lower GI test.  These are done to diagnose diseases of the colon or to check on progress of an already diagnosed illness.  Barium, a contrast material fills the colon and x-rays are taken.  There are two types.  A Single Contrast is when the barium, through a tube, fills the colon making it easier to see the outline of the colon and larger abnormalities.  A Double Contrast, or Air Contrast, is when the barium fills the colon but is then drained, only leaving a thin layer covering the inner lining of the colon.  Air is then pumped into the colon making it easier to see the inner lining and smaller details of the colon i.e. pouches or strictures.  I was having both Contrast test done to check the entire colon.  In order to prep for it, you can only eat clear fluids (i.e. black tea or coffee, ginger ale, jello etc.) for a couple of days before the test and must take laxatives (liquid and pill form) and tap-water enemas.  The colon must be as clean as possible in order to get accurate results.  For me personally, the preps for these tests are far worse than the tests themselves.  Not so for the double contrast barium enema, it hurts.

It was the morning of my test and I was in severe pain.  It was radiating into my back and felt like my body was being squeezed all the way around in a vice.  One of my nurses came in with an enema bag that looked like it could hold 3 bags of milk.  I had already taken the liquid laxatives and this one was a warm, soapy tap water enema.

My pain was so bad at the time that the idea of holding that much water in my colon for as long as I could was just something that I couldn't do.  She went and got me some pain medication, gave me 20 minutes for it to work and came back.  I still wasn't happy to see her, but it had to be done.

The worst part of this test is when your colon gets filled with air and the radiologist presses down on your abdomen with a paddle in order to get the pictures just right.  Finally my test was done and I was back in my bed.

I had the next day off but had another test the day after that.  A CAT Scan.  At that time Guelph didn't have a CAT Scan machine so I had to go to Waterloo to have it done.  My Dad was going to take time off work to take me.

The morning we were to go I was so sick.  I was vomiting, weak and in pain.  I just felt horrible, but there was no way that it could be cancelled.  It felt great though to be in a car again, it had been almost a month.  We made jokes about not going there or back to the hospital, It was really great spending the time with my Dad.  When I was first diagnosed and was in the hospital for months, he would bring his lunch, and come up to visit me during his lunch hour.  It meant so much to me.

When we got to Waterloo I had no idea what to expect, it was my first CAT Scan.  After we registered a nurse brought a glass a pitcher of liquid and told me that I had to drink it all.  It tasted horrible and because of my nausea I vomited almost half of it back up.  It was a horrible experience.  I was having hot flashes, then the chills, I felt so sick that any other day it wouldn't have been so bad.  Finally when my name was called my Dad and I got up, we were put into another room and I had to put on a gown.  I passed him my clothes to be locked up and he helped to ANOTHER room.  They told me that I need to have an i.v. put in for the second contrast material and they couldn't use my TPN for it.  Well by the 11th attempt at getting one in I told them to get an anesthetist, because I wasn't going to be poked one more time!  They even looked at the veins in my feet!  That doctor showed up and bam, first shot he got it in, he was my hero!

They put me on the table, they went into their room behind the glass, and I yelled at them to stop.  One of them ran in and asked me what was wrong and I told her that it felt like I wet my pants!  She said she should have warned me about that, that it was just the dye going through my body into the blood vessels. Whew!

The other two came out of the little room and asked me when the last time I had a Barium Test was.  I told them that it was two days ago, and they unhooked my i.v. and sent me back to Guelph.  You can't have a CAT Scan within a week of having a barium test because the two different types of contrast work against each other.  You have got to be kidding!  Didn't anyone from Guelph General know that?  I was so mad and my Dad had smoke coming out of his ears.  When we got back I crawled into my hospital bed and he marched up to the nurse's station.  I hope he gave them a piece of his mind because I had to go through all of it again the next week after all of the barium was out of my system.

The moral of this story is that no one knows everything.  People are going to screw up, even doctors and nurses, and you might be the one that suffers, but you just have to take the blows and move on.  When I did go and get the CAT Scan we found out that my gall bladder was three times too big and needed to be removed.  They wouldn't have seen that when they did my re-section, so it's a good thing that I had that test.   

A Spoonful of Sugar Helps the Medicine go Down, Not with This Medicine.

Keeping in mind that my diagnosis was way back in 1989, there weren't the same treatments that there are today.  There were only a few options to help heal the damage caused by the disease.  Surgery to remove the damaged areas of bowel was a last ditch effort.  Healing the damage using the medications available at the time was the first choice.

I was put on Salofalk, which is a 5-ASA drug used for combating the inflammation in the bowel.  I took it in pill form, eight a day, and also in liquid suppositories at bedtime.  Usually suppositories are used to clean out the bowel, so you have the urge to go quite badly.  When this feeling occurs you usually can give into it, but with these suppositories, to get the healing effect you can't give in, you have to hold it in.  It was very uncomfortable and an experience I had to go through every night for six months.

Imuran was another medication that I was given daily.  It is an immunosuppressive agent used to suppress the bodies immune system.  Crohn's Disease is a disease of the immune system attacking the digestive tract, so this medication stopped the immune system from attacking my bowel causing more damage.  It was effective but opens you up to catching any bug that is around because you can't fight them off.

Prednisone was the worst medication that I had to take.  It is a corticosteroid and is also helps with the inflammation caused by the disease, it is also an immunosuppressive.  It had the worst side-effects of any medication that I have ever taken so far in my life.  It improves your appetite, causes water retention which makes you appear like you have gained a lot of weight, makes you feel lightheaded, nervous or agitated, sweaty and flushed, you can have skin problems from it and a "moon face".  This is when your face becomes almost completely round.  It makes your face puffy-looking as if you had just come from the dentist from having your wisdom teeth removed.  I also had hallucinations.  Those and the anxiety were the worst.

I was also put on a couple of antibiotics but the worst one was Flagyl.  It is used specifically for abdominal infections.  It caused "Thrush" which is a yeast infection in the mouth.  After the many long months of being in the hospital when I was finally able to go home, my sister and her husband were going to take me to the cottage to be with my family for a couple of weeks,  My mouth and tongue had been hurting and very sensitive for a couple of days but when I woke up that morning it was so much worse.  I went to the bathroom to brush my teeth and looked at my tongue.  It, my gums and the inside of my cheeks were completely black!  I flipped right out and called my Gastro to find out what the heck was going on.  His secretary told me he wanted me to come in as soon as I could, so I dressed and packed in a hurry, called my sister to come and get me early and headed to his office.  When I got there I opened my mouth, stuck out my tongue and asked him "What now?, what is this?".  Of course he smiled at me like he always did, and told me it was thrush, a yeast infection.  He wrote me out a prescription, and as usual I asked him what it tasted like.  He laughed and said he didn't know, and that where this medication usually goes there aren't any taste buds.  That last part went right over my head and I didn't understand what he was talking about until the script was filled and I was in the car on the way to the cottage.  I opened the bag that it was in, read the package and then it hit me.  The script was for vaginal suppositories for vaginal yeast infections and the directions on the box said that I had to suck on them like lozenges.  YUCK!
When we got to the cottage and my family found out that I had to suck on vaginal yeast infection suppositories, they laughed whenever I had to take a dose. 
Now there is a liquid medication for this problem called Nystatin.  Believe me, it tastes much better. :)

I Found My Hero!

I had been taking the "Digest" pills that the Iridologist had given me for about a month, and I was getting worse not better.  After consulting my Mom and my other practitioners they all told me the same thing.  They said that I could possibly be having a "Healing Crisis".  That is when during the healing process, your symptoms get worse, when the body is getting rid of all of the toxins that have been stored up.  When this process is over you generally will improve.

But my "Gut Instincts" were working over time again, I had a feeling that there wouldn't be any improvement or healing from this.  I thought that the ingredients in the pills were just feeding my "Monster" and that he was getting stronger.  I missed more work in that one month than I had in the four years I had been working at that job.  I gave it more time like they suggested, but felt it wouldn't matter how much time I waited, I felt so sick, and I only weighed eighty-five pounds, I thought I was going to die.

My Dr. and Mom were concerned as well, and he finally called to make me an appointment with a Gastroenterologist.  I couldn't wait to go.  The two weeks dragged by, but the day finally came.  My Mom brought me to the appointment.  The minute I saw him I knew he would be able to help me, being incredibly good looking didn't hurt either!

He asked me a lot of questions about my symptoms, my pain, medications I was taking, and my diet.  He threw out the antacid pills that my family doctor's partner gave me and said they were useless.  I was then examined.  He felt the glands on my neck, and when he pushed on the lower left side of my abdomen I almost jumped off the table it hurt so much.  We all went into his office to talk.  He said he thought that I could have Crohn's Disease or Colon Cancer.  I said  "I'll take that crone thing" meaning that I really didn't want to have Cancer.  What he said to me next frightened me.  He said that many of his Crohn's patients commonly wish that it was terminal because they really suffer a lot, it's painful and there is no cure.  Before he finished his sentence, I stood up and said  "Wow, I feel so much better all of the sudden, so maybe I'm okay now".   I looked at my Mom and sat right back down, joking around like that is just a defence mechanism for me or else when I'm nervous or afraid I would end up crying.  His secretary scheduled me for a Colonoscopy (he didn't really get into what that was all about) and on the way home we stopped to have all of my blood tests done.

It was two weeks until the Colonoscopy, and I was finally ready for answers and treatment.



 

Are The Eyes Windows? You Bet They Are!

The visits with an Iridologist back when I was 19 years old, before my Crohn's diagnosis and the recommendations given were the beginning of the end of my quest for answers. Going this route was the best thing that could have happened at that time. Every aspect of my life had been infected by this "Monster" and I was at an all time low, but about to hear something that no one else had said to me that would give me the confidence to keep fighting it.

This specialist agreed with my intuition that these mysterious and miserable symptoms were related to my Digestive Tract. Having someone tell me that they believed my "Gut Instincts" meant more than you could possibly imagine. She didn't think that I was a nutso attention seeker or anything else, she knew that there was a "Monster". She was on my side. She did what I wanted my Doctor, family and friends to do. She looked at me, really looked, but more importantly she listened to me and wanted to help.

If you looked at me back then you probably would have thought I was anorexic like some people did, or that I was very ill. I was five feet, five inches tall and weighed under one hundred pounds. I was under eighty pounds when I was diagnosed. I was trying to do all of the right things for better health, I was eating all of the right foods. But eating was very unpleasant experience. Food tasted great but minutes later I would be doubled over in pain, and it passed through me so fast that it wouldn't be in my body long enough to absorb any nutrients. From my visits with the iridologist I would find out that all of the so-called good food I was injesting wasn't doing me any good at all and was just irritating my bowels more than anything else. I was so ready for answers and ready to stop faking how I felt.

I was going to work everyday even though I had no energy and the pain was inscruciating, but I didn't want anyone to think that I was slacking off. I tried to do everything all of my friends were doing, I didn't want to be left behind. I had learned a long time ago when all of my test results kept coming back normal not to complain anymore about how I felt. Everyone around me was as sick of hearing about it as I was of living it, so I kept my mouth shut as much as possible. That didn't stop people from talking about me behind my back, or even to my face about how I was upsetting them. I stayed over night at a friend's house one night, and in the morning while I was getting dressed she took a picture of me. We didn't have digital cameras back then, but when she got the roll back she sat me down, showed me the pictures and told me that I was thin enough, I had made my point, got all of the attention I wanted and should start eating again. I was so hurt. My "Monster" had been around for years, and I couldn't believe people that I cared about, and that were supposed to care about me could be so cruel, deaf to what I had confided in them and blind.

But now I had my Mom and my Iridologist on my team! After analyzing the characteristics of my irises she told me that there were signs of inflammation in my bowel and that there was a good chance that a duct that lead to the gall bladder was blocked. I was shocked that all she had done was look at my eyes and could tell that my Digestive Tract wasn't working properly, and yet my Doctor had run all sorts of tests with no signs of any problems at all. Was he just not running the right tests? She gave me some all-natural pills to aid in digestion, I was to take two of them a half an hour before meals.

This was to be the start of a new healthier pain-free life for me! I was so excited I could barely sleep that night and couldn't wait to start my new regime.

There's Always An Alternative - Medicines

After I was released from the hospital for the blood infection, I was more concerned about my health than ever. My "Monster" was causing so much chaos in my body, yet it was being very sneaky and playing "Hide-and-Seek" with the Doctors. I was determined to find out what was wrong with me, so determined that I would have tried anything, and I almost did.

I was 19 at the time, and all I wanted was to be normal like everyone else.

I had been meditating on my pain for years now, sitting quietly on my bedroom floor, closing my eyes and trying to locate where the pain was. After some practice, I could see my body in my mind's eye and the painful areas would light up, almost glow. I knew that more than one area hurt. After the laparoscope was done a year before, the pelvic pain was completely gone. The endometriosis was the source of it. But I still had to figure out what was causing the pain above my belly-button, in my lower back and abdomen. One down, three to go.

I couldn't wait for my Doctor to believe me. I had to search for the answers on my own. The pain was almost unbearable, yet I wasn't given anything for it because "pain medication won't help pain that is all in your head". I took out books from the library and tried to teach myself Biofeedback techniques to try to desensitise myself to the pain, but I found it almost impossible to do. I decided to look into some unconventional healing methods. I was one hundred percent sure that my digestive tract was the source of most of my problems due to the pain being worse after eating, and having everything that I did eat go right through me. I was desperate and under ninety pounds. If I could have somehow found a way to help my symptoms I would have been so incredibly happy.

I started with buying some Healing Crystals and a book about them. Supposedly if you put the right type of crystal on the proper place, the power of them can heal what ails you. Every night for months, I would lay on my bed with the crystals all over my body, listening to a Relaxation CD of the sounds of the ocean. I also carried them in a pouch around my neck for further protection during the day.

My Mom came into my room to say good night to me one evening, and found me covered with my crystals. I think it was then that she realized that I was really suffering since I was trying to heal myself in private, if I had been faking I wouldn't have been trying to cure myself, or keeping up the pretense while I was alone. Until then she hadn't believed that there was anything wrong with me either. She had been seeing a Chinese Herbalist for some health issues of her own and suggested that I go see him too. I figured it wouldn't hurt and that maybe a new set of eyeballs on the situation could get to the bottom of things. That was a really interesting experience. He did a complete exam and thought that my pancreas was sluggish or that a duct leading to it may be blocked. He wanted to strengthen and unblock the flow of my "chi", which is the life energy of the body. Accupuncture was done three times a week, and he made up herbal tea packages for me to drink. They contained dried barks, mushrooms, leaves and berries. I boiled the herbs in a pot until there was only a half a cup of liquid left, actually saying liquid is being generous, it looked more like sludge and tasted just about how you would imagine sludge would taste, YUCKY! I couldn't believe that I was paying someone to make me drink that foul-flavoured mixture. By the time that I was supposed to show signs of improvement I hadn't felt any better so I moved on.

These treatments help many millions of people around the globe everyday, and I would highly recommend anyone that is not getting the help they want or need from Western Medicines, or want their treatment to have a more holistic approach to consider using these techniques.

The hunt was on again for answers. I never stopped going to my Family Doctor and pleading with him to help me, but a frustrating cycle would occur. The more tests I asked him to requisition for me, the more the results would be returned normal, and the more he would believe I was a hypochondriac, so I continued down the road with Alternatives. First I went to a Naturopathic Doctor and learned how to improve my diet and was introduced to some botanical medicines. They deal more with symptoms and the body as a whole.

I also had appointments with an Iridologist. They look at and analyze only the iris to detect health issues that you could have now, or that could possibly occur in the future. A picture of your iris is taken and turned into a slide. To see your five or so foot tall eye blown up on a wall is quite the experience, let me tell you! Mine looked kind of like a blue cratered surface of the moon! When reading the slides they can tell many things from the flecks, density of the colour and locations of different markings. I had a gold fleck that was called a "Mother's Jewel". The appearance of this fleck is supposed to mean that your Mother is very caring, worried and concerned about you. This shocked me and made me feel defeated all at the same time. It was like going to a psychic but realizing that they are only telling you what you want to hear. I didn't believe that about my Mom at first. Why would she have been worried about me if she thought that I was faking it or a hypochondriac? But then I looked at her as she was sitting beside me, and she was nodding "yes" at me with tears in her eyes. I never doubted her belief in my pain again, and I never loved her that much as I did in that moment.

Am I cured?

With everyone around me thinking that I was making up my symptoms, or starving myself to death, I started to wonder if I was crazy too. I mean wouldn't you? Every test that I had came back negative, I was eating healthy foods and exercising to try to take care of myself. I wasn't complaining about it all any more, because what was the point, no one believed me anyway. But I must have just been imagining the pain that made me double over or feel like I was going to pass out, and the hours that I would sit and spend in the bathroom with unrelenting diarrhea, having anything that I ate go right through me in seconds.

I was so frustrated! I would pray to be healed and barter with God how I would never do anything wrong ever again if he would just take my pain away, but that night it would make it very hard to fall asleep, and the next morning it would wake me up even before my alarm would go off. Looking back now I am really kind of surprised that I never blamed God for any of it. I was never angry with Him, I never gave up my faith because he wouldn't answer my prayers. I found my faith actually getting stronger the sicker that I was getting. I knew in my heart that there was something terribly wrong, and if I was going to die from whatever mystery illness that I had, I knew that it was all apart of His plan for me.

Many of the women on my Mom's side of the family had endometriosis, with some of them having to have hysterectomies, that came up at one of my doctors appointments. Endometriosis is when the cells from the endometrial lining of the uterus start to grow on the outside of it. I like to use the analogy of a jelly-filled doughnut. The jelly gets out of the middle of the doughnut and spreads all over the other doughnuts in the box, like the crullers or bear-claws. These cells start growing (they don't know why) on the uterus, fallopian tubes, bladder or ovaries. Since there was a pretty good chance that I could have inherited it, my doctor referred me to a Gynecologist.

I had no idea how that could have had anything to do with pain from eating, but I was just happy that it could be the problem and that I could finally be on my way to being diagnosed with something other than being out for attention, and could be treated for it. Everyone had made me feel so bad about myself for so long, that I wanted to find out what was wrong just to prove to them that there was something wrong! Not because I wanted something to be wrong, but to prove that I was right, that I knew my body better than anyone else did, and that listening to my instincts was the right thing to do.

The only real way to diagnose endometriosis is to actually see it, so I had to go to the hospital for a laparoscope. It was quite a simple surgery, day surgery, just in and out, but I was so afraid (and still am!) of needles. I didn't care about the cutting me open part, I started having such a panic attack that I wanted to go running and screaming from the building just thinking about the i.v.. I tried to escape a couple of times right over the head of the gurney but I wasn't fast enough, and I didn't want to let go of my Mom's hand when they wanted to wheel me through the big surgery doors but I had no choice.

Being inside that hallway freaked me out because they just pushed me up against the wall, and left me there to get more and more panicked. As I lay there calculating the opportunity for escape, a clean getaway, an occupied gurney was wheeled out of the operating room. There was a woman sleeping soundlessly on it with a tube coming out of her nose. That's when I almost lost it. I started to cry out of sheer fear, and that was when a nurse came over to go over my chart with me. She showed me her funny watch to try to get me to smile, and it worked. She actually asked me what grade I was in, and happening to have been eighteen and graduated from high school at the time, that made me smile more.

That nurse stayed with me as I transferred myself onto the operating table and let me squeeze her hand as the i.v. was being put in. She really made the whole experience much easier than I thought it was going to be. I felt a sharp pain in my arm, my doctor said "Lights out now Trace", and the next thing I knew I was in Recovery. The surgeon came in to talk to me and said that I did have Endometriosis, it was on my tubes, ovaries, bladder and the outside of my uterus. He said that he cauterized it all (burned it off) and that I should find a big difference in the pain that I was having from now on. He said that he was happy that I now knew what was causing all of my discomfort. I was happy too, but I had a feeling that it was not over.

About three or four days later the surgical pain was gone, but not my "Monster". That was the name I had given Crohn's before I knew what it was. I told my family doctor, my friends and family that not much had changed, that the pelvic pain was gone but not the back or abdominal pains and all of my other symptoms were still there. None of them were very impressed with me, they all decided that I wanted to be sick, and their feelings about me complaining for attention intensified.

So was I cured? Not even close.

It's Complicated

I didn't end up having my colonoscopy on friday. I drank half of my prep like I was supposed to, and had every intention of getting up early the next morning to drink the other half. But sometimes things have a tendancy of not working out the way we want them to.

I could feel the familiar rumbling in my belly, but I also felt a nagging nausea and that made me nervous. After downing that horrible stuff, eight ounces every ten minutes for two hours, the last thing that I wanted was to feel like it was going to come back up.

I'm sure that I'm not the only Crohn's patient that has certain traditions that they keep for the day and night before a colonoscopy. I always set up the bathroom with things to keep me occupied like books, games and my Journal. I was writing an entry when I started to feel horrible abdominal pain and a migraine coming on. It kept getting worse, and worse so at first when I threw up I was happy because the pressure in my head subsided. But then I realized what was going on and I was not a happy camper at all.

I have had over ten surgeries so I have a lot of scar tissue, adhesions as they are called. Every time that I get cut open my scar keloids, this is when it becomes wider and thicker than normal. Inside my abdomen the scar tissue attaches itself all over the bowel, other organs and to the peritoneum, the lining of the abdominal cavity. These adhesions have caused bowel obstructions before and I knew that was what was happening again. The scar tissue is sticky so it makes the bowel stick to itself, or it wraps around the bowel cutting off the passageway, and potentially the circulation. This is one of the complications of having surgery. I have had to have emergency surgery for this before because the circulation was cut off. If the blood can't flow through the bowel, it will die and eventually cause gangrine, which causes blood poisoning that could lead to death.

I knew that it was only a partial obstruction due to the fact that things were moving out of both ends. If I was only vomiting I would have been way more concerned. If this ever happens to you, DO NOT think that it will just get better on it's own or that you can take care of it on your own, go straight to the hospital. Most likely you will need a naso-gastral tube inserted into your nose to suck out the fluid which eases the pressure off of the obstructed area. It is highly uncomfortable but helps to eleviate some of the pain. Most of the time with bowel rest, no food or water, the obstruction will loosen on it's own, only when it doesn't will they operate and go in to cauterize, or burn off the adhesions. This is one reason that surgery is always the last option, because every time they operate, adhesions can form, so having the adhesions cauterized can just cause more adhesions. It's a very vicious cycle.

I have been through this many times and know what to do to help the obstruction resolve itself, so I didn't need to stay in the hospital, also it was a partial obstruction so I didn't need a tube. If it had progressed, I would have been right back up to the hospital begging them to admit me.

It is now Tuesday and I am feeling much better, also my colonoscopy has been re-sheduled to take place in August. If you have any questions about complications of any kind I will be happy to answer them. And I hope you never have any yourself.

Gut Instincts (cont)

Back to "Gut Instincts":

After getting nowhere with that doctor, my family decided to switch to a new family doctor, and I was ready for a real diagnosis. No jokes, just facts. I just wanted to be, and feel normal again.

I was losing weight rapidly, was nauseous all the time, had diarrhea multiple times a day, and the pain was getting worse. I was told to quit my dancing lessons and gymnastics by my old doctor. I wasn't happy about it, but I just didn't have the energy anymore. I was also having such bad joint pain that I was finding it all very difficult anyway.

I left my first appointment with the new doctor, had some blood drawn and x-rays and was hoping that he would be the answer to my prayers. But he didn't help either, he thought that I was a hypochondriac, or that my symptoms were just psychosomatic. And because he was an M.D. and didn't think anything was wrong with me, my friends and family decided that he was probably right. That didn't sit very well with me, they treated me like I was crazy and just making it all up.

High School was ending, and I was working two jobs. I was getting worse and kept going back to see the new doctor over and over again, but nothing changed. At one visit my doctor was away so I saw one of his partners instead. I thought maybe he would have some new ideas. Oh, he had ideas alright, he told me all I really needed was a good shrink! and he gave me a script for some antacid. Really helpful, not.

When my doctor got back, I went to see him again, and told him that I really believed that there was something inside of me that wasn't supposed to be there. I told him that I wanted to go and get an Anatomy book, cut myself open, and remove the object of my pain. He looked at me like I was nuts and just sent me for more blood tests which came back negative for everything.

Because of my weight loss, anorexia was brought up. I knew that wasn't the problem. I swore up and down that I wanted to eat, was hungry, but it just hurt too much every time I ingested anything.

I started smoking pot to help with the pain, especially at bedtime because the pain would wake me up so many times during the night, that on top of being drained, and feeling weak from not eating, I was exhausted from being up and down all night.

I graduated from high school, got a new job with an Engineering firm and quit the other two. The company was owned by a friend's Dad and I loved it there. I should have been healthy, happy and enjoying my new life.

But with friends, my boyfriend, my family and my doctor thinking that I was faking my pain, I started to doubt myself at times and wondered if I was just imagining it all, or maybe not taking care of myself properly. That was really hard, thinking that I was doing something to cause this all to happen to me. I decided to make some changes to see if they would help.

I started running again, that had always been one of my favorite ways to get exercise. I started to make healthy lunches (and making myself eat them) to bring to work with me instead of going to the fast food places with co-workers. After a couple of months of implementing these changes I was feeling worse. The pain was increasing and I was literally spending hours a day in the bathroom with diarrhea.

This was a really hard and lonely time for me. No one wanted to hear about my pain and other symptoms anymore. Some friends stopped being there for me. I would sit cross-legged on my bedroom floor and meditate on the pain and it's location. The worst pain was in my lower back, just above my belly button and in my lower pelvis. I had been doing this for months and I really could feel like there was a foreign object inside me that needed to be removed. I knew that I wasn't crazy or imagining it. I knew that there was something really wrong and I wasn't going to stop bugging my doctor until we had answers. I was going to listen to my "Gut Instincts"!

I decided that I just wouldn't talk about it anymore, and no matter how I was feeling I would pretend that I felt great. It was very stressful, and I would cry myself to sleep some nights praying for God to either heal me or let me die so that I wouldn't have to suffer anymore.

Gut Instincts

Have you ever felt or knew that something was wrong with you, but you just couldn't put your finger on what it was?
That started to happen to me when I was grade 10. I was a relatively healthy person until then, I was active in gymnastics, dancing lessons, school sports and theatre. But one morning I got up early for a gymnastics practice at school and skipped breakfast.
I was starving during my second period class so I ate an orange, and by third period I was in the nurse's room with the worst abdominal pain I had ever had. She told me it was because I ate the orange on an empty stomach, but who doesn't eat fruit for breakfast? It didn't make sense to me.
The pain never went away from that day on, and I was a frequent visitor at my family doctors office.
He thought the pain was ovulation. Everyday? I didn't think so.
I was also experiencing joint pain that I had never had before, especially in my knees. Once when I went back and complained about it, he told me it was from tap dancing.
I said "I have been tap dancing for years and never had this problem before", he said "Tap dancing can be very, very dangerous you know, you could fall into the sink!". Funny, but not the help I was looking for.

I just kept getting sicker and sicker, and every fiber of my being told me that there was something serious going on, but help wasn't going to come from him.