Starting the detox off gently - about half-and-half normal foods and health foods - in the hopes that it doesn't shock my system too badly. I do NOT want a repeat of the boils I had last time, for example.
I'm not really supposed to be doing this until this round of tests is complete, but I can't seem to complete them (for reasons that I will not go into here, for the sake of politeness - although if you've been following the saga you can probably read between the lines) and I simply can NOT go on the way I've been going, not feeling as bad as I have.
So.
Day 1 - Wednesday 15th August:
Lunch:
4 squares bitter dark chocolate
1 apple
1 satsuma
50g fresh coconut
50g raw pumpkin seeds (hulled)
1 coconut flavour yoghurt (Perle du Lait - not probiotic)
Dinner:
1 Innocent veg pot (Caribbean curry with mango & rice)
1/2 glass orange juice (150 ml)
1 apricot Activia (probiotic)
Health: I can feel the start of die-off. Brain is fogged...can't...stay...awake...
Now, aren't you glad you just wasted ninety seconds of your life reading this note?
Wednesday 15 August 2012
Silently The Senses Abandon Their Defenses
"Nighttime sharpens, heightens each sensation,
Darkness stirs and wakes imagination."
~ Phantom of the Opera
Sometimes I wake in the middle of the night, and in those few seconds between sleeping and waking, I see myself as I really am, and it frightens me.
During the daytime my brain is wakeful and able to create a shield, a sort of glamour over my life that maintains all the illusions, all the lies I tell myself to make my life seem better than what it is; to make ME seem better than what I am. But in that split-second moment between the sleeping illusion of dreams and the waking illusion of wishes, I see myself more clearly and brutally than at any other time.
The child I call my foster kid - "for convenience, to prevent the need for complicated explanations" - was never mine legally, he was just a boy I let live with me, and helped take care of, and loved. My work is not a real job, not anything that could support me and pay my medical bills if I attempted to live alone, merely a way to keep marginally socialised and feel useful. The man I call my ex-boyfriend was never my boyfriend, never claimed me in front of his friends or family, never loved me, and yet I continue to have affection for him, continue to keep him in my life until he chooses to walk out again. My eating habits are appalling, and probably most of my health problems are my own fault due to the fact that I don't eat right. I don't exercise nearly as much as I like to think. I'm not kind to my mother. I have no education, have wasted my intelligence, and all too often fool people into thinking I know more about a subject than I actually do. And I supposedly suffer from fibromyalgia, but I'm not 100% sure that it's not all in my head.
Perhaps you, too, suffer from night demons that claw at the fluffy swathes of self-satisfaction that you wrap yourself in during the daytime. Or perhaps you are more honest with yourself than I am. Who can say?
So often people speak of sleep as a comforting blanket that we cocoon ourselves in to give us some downtime from the world, to dream of better days, but I have always found that the waking hours are the ones where dreams and illusions abound.
Darkness stirs and wakes imagination."
~ Phantom of the Opera
Sometimes I wake in the middle of the night, and in those few seconds between sleeping and waking, I see myself as I really am, and it frightens me.
During the daytime my brain is wakeful and able to create a shield, a sort of glamour over my life that maintains all the illusions, all the lies I tell myself to make my life seem better than what it is; to make ME seem better than what I am. But in that split-second moment between the sleeping illusion of dreams and the waking illusion of wishes, I see myself more clearly and brutally than at any other time.
The child I call my foster kid - "for convenience, to prevent the need for complicated explanations" - was never mine legally, he was just a boy I let live with me, and helped take care of, and loved. My work is not a real job, not anything that could support me and pay my medical bills if I attempted to live alone, merely a way to keep marginally socialised and feel useful. The man I call my ex-boyfriend was never my boyfriend, never claimed me in front of his friends or family, never loved me, and yet I continue to have affection for him, continue to keep him in my life until he chooses to walk out again. My eating habits are appalling, and probably most of my health problems are my own fault due to the fact that I don't eat right. I don't exercise nearly as much as I like to think. I'm not kind to my mother. I have no education, have wasted my intelligence, and all too often fool people into thinking I know more about a subject than I actually do. And I supposedly suffer from fibromyalgia, but I'm not 100% sure that it's not all in my head.
Perhaps you, too, suffer from night demons that claw at the fluffy swathes of self-satisfaction that you wrap yourself in during the daytime. Or perhaps you are more honest with yourself than I am. Who can say?
So often people speak of sleep as a comforting blanket that we cocoon ourselves in to give us some downtime from the world, to dream of better days, but I have always found that the waking hours are the ones where dreams and illusions abound.
Monday 6 August 2012
Might As Well Just Throw Me In A Spider Pit And Be Done With It
Yeah, it's been a while.
I'm not well. That probably shouldn't be any real surprise to you, given how my health has been for more than half my life now, but this is more than most episodes of unwellness, although less than October's.
My stomach started acting up in March. At first I thought it was a bug, then I thought it was my implant needing to come out, then I thought I was pregnant. After a couple months of this, I started wondering if it was more serious than that. So I booked a couple doctors appointments. And lo and behold, every time I got an appointment and time came to go to that appointment, my stomach would be quite a bit better. I figured it was psychosomatic, some stupid attention-seeking thing that my body devised just to make me look like an idiot (like I need help there!). Started getting fatter and fatter, and wrote that off as eating too much, or eating the wrong things - twenty-some years of periodic anorexia, and a mother with an unspecified eating disorder, have taken their toll on me, and while I do try to eat properly, or as properly as possible, I still go through phases where anything more than a bowl of cucumber and tomato and some carrot sticks in a day feels like eating too much.
Kept a food diary for a month, with everything I put in my mouth other than water on it, and also details of how my health was on each day. Kept a more general health diary for several months. Realised that my stomach problem doesn't resolve itself because I have a doctor's appointment, it just goes in a four-week cycle. First week I feel like I'm dying, and call for an appointment (or not). Appointment takes ten days to two weeks to come through. Second week I feel fine (well, tired, but not awful). Third week I feel a little strange, but not too bad. Fourth week is the same as week 2. Then we're back to a week of feeling like I'm in a Ridley Scott movie.
I'm in to the hospital for tests on my digestive system tomorrow and Tuesday. Disgusting, humiliating tests that make me want to cry just thinking about them. I have major squicks when it comes to anything involving the digestive system. Just about anything else medical I can handle with equanimity, but GI stuff, whichever end it's focused at, freaks me out in the same way that visiting the gynaecologist freaks some women. I have suspicions about what's wrong with me, and I'm swinging between wanting it fixed, NOW, and wanting to stick my head in the sand and my fingers in my ears and never find out that my suspicions are correct. I can't even explain how much this terrifies me and grosses me out, because unless you have the same phobia / disgust, you can't understand it. I don't want to know. Ever. I don't want to know how dangerous the world is, how fragile the human body can be, how prone to disease and parasites and trauma and random acts of chance we are.
Yet I NEED to know, so I can get it fixed. I cannot keep going around like this - I'm malnourished, and forcing myself to eat more only seems to make the problem worse. My skin is sallow and blemishes - even silly things like insect bites and papercuts - are taking weeks if not months to heal. I can't stay awake in the day and can't sleep at night. All my lymph nodes are raised and painful. I have trouble breathing, and constantly feel like something's squeezing my lungs. I have weeks when I am constantly hungry - to the point of pain - no matter how much I eat, and weeks when I don't want to eat at all. My nails are broken right down to the halfway point. I have no sex drive - except, of course, for the weeks between the bad ones, when I have an insatiable one. That's not even taking into account how I feel during the bad weeks, the kind of pain that makes you feel like you are being literally torn up from the inside out. For that one bad week of the month, I can't leave the house, because at any time I can go into the spasms of pain that feel for all the world like something inside is clawing and biting its way out. The doctor called this type of pain "colicky". I can kind of understand now why colic kills horses. When I get it, I sometimes feel like it's going to kill me. Yeah, I know how that sounds, and I'm not generally prone to melodrama about my health - or anything else, for that matter - but it's no more and no less than the truth. While I'm sure, at least in my head, that it's NOT going to kill me, it still feels like it's ripping me apart when it happens. Even miscarrying didn't hurt this much.
Speaking of miscarrying, my stomach size is the main thing - aside from the pain - that made the doctor take me seriously, when I was so sure that she wouldn't, so I suppose I should be grateful for such a visible symptom. Instead, I'm just pissed off, because I look like I'm seven months pregnant with twins.
You wanna see? 'Course you do.
Before and after - early winter (maybe November? December?) vs now. The before was taken at my previous plumpest, after I put on thirty pounds when I had the strep. Until now I had never in my life had a stomach that stuck out further than my breasts. And no, I haven't been pigging out. So, tests. I just have to suck it up and do what needs to be done, which is a skill I should have mastered by now, what with all the practice I've had during this lifetime. Instead I've been sitting here snivelling for the last couple weeks because I feel so ill and apathetic and miserable and tired and boo hoo, I feel so sorry for myself, blah blah blah.
On the plus side, for the run up to the tests I've been having to eat a lot of crap - starch, meat, sugar - because we WANT the problems to be at their worst, so there's a chance something might actually show up. In that way, feeling like shit is a good thing...kind of...because the last thing I want is inconclusive tests. I've had a lifetime of inconclusive tests. And as soon as they're over, at least this round of them, I can start eating raw fruit and veg and seeds and grains, and a little bit of cooked rice and chicken, like a normal person. Normal in my world, anyway.
:)
So that's the image I'm holding onto. Get it done, and then I get to throw the chips and pizza out the window and say hello to pineapple and pumpkin and pomegranate, which I've missed a lot.
Assuming I don't die of fright and disgust today or tomorrow.
I'm not well. That probably shouldn't be any real surprise to you, given how my health has been for more than half my life now, but this is more than most episodes of unwellness, although less than October's.
My stomach started acting up in March. At first I thought it was a bug, then I thought it was my implant needing to come out, then I thought I was pregnant. After a couple months of this, I started wondering if it was more serious than that. So I booked a couple doctors appointments. And lo and behold, every time I got an appointment and time came to go to that appointment, my stomach would be quite a bit better. I figured it was psychosomatic, some stupid attention-seeking thing that my body devised just to make me look like an idiot (like I need help there!). Started getting fatter and fatter, and wrote that off as eating too much, or eating the wrong things - twenty-some years of periodic anorexia, and a mother with an unspecified eating disorder, have taken their toll on me, and while I do try to eat properly, or as properly as possible, I still go through phases where anything more than a bowl of cucumber and tomato and some carrot sticks in a day feels like eating too much.
Kept a food diary for a month, with everything I put in my mouth other than water on it, and also details of how my health was on each day. Kept a more general health diary for several months. Realised that my stomach problem doesn't resolve itself because I have a doctor's appointment, it just goes in a four-week cycle. First week I feel like I'm dying, and call for an appointment (or not). Appointment takes ten days to two weeks to come through. Second week I feel fine (well, tired, but not awful). Third week I feel a little strange, but not too bad. Fourth week is the same as week 2. Then we're back to a week of feeling like I'm in a Ridley Scott movie.
I'm in to the hospital for tests on my digestive system tomorrow and Tuesday. Disgusting, humiliating tests that make me want to cry just thinking about them. I have major squicks when it comes to anything involving the digestive system. Just about anything else medical I can handle with equanimity, but GI stuff, whichever end it's focused at, freaks me out in the same way that visiting the gynaecologist freaks some women. I have suspicions about what's wrong with me, and I'm swinging between wanting it fixed, NOW, and wanting to stick my head in the sand and my fingers in my ears and never find out that my suspicions are correct. I can't even explain how much this terrifies me and grosses me out, because unless you have the same phobia / disgust, you can't understand it. I don't want to know. Ever. I don't want to know how dangerous the world is, how fragile the human body can be, how prone to disease and parasites and trauma and random acts of chance we are.
Yet I NEED to know, so I can get it fixed. I cannot keep going around like this - I'm malnourished, and forcing myself to eat more only seems to make the problem worse. My skin is sallow and blemishes - even silly things like insect bites and papercuts - are taking weeks if not months to heal. I can't stay awake in the day and can't sleep at night. All my lymph nodes are raised and painful. I have trouble breathing, and constantly feel like something's squeezing my lungs. I have weeks when I am constantly hungry - to the point of pain - no matter how much I eat, and weeks when I don't want to eat at all. My nails are broken right down to the halfway point. I have no sex drive - except, of course, for the weeks between the bad ones, when I have an insatiable one. That's not even taking into account how I feel during the bad weeks, the kind of pain that makes you feel like you are being literally torn up from the inside out. For that one bad week of the month, I can't leave the house, because at any time I can go into the spasms of pain that feel for all the world like something inside is clawing and biting its way out. The doctor called this type of pain "colicky". I can kind of understand now why colic kills horses. When I get it, I sometimes feel like it's going to kill me. Yeah, I know how that sounds, and I'm not generally prone to melodrama about my health - or anything else, for that matter - but it's no more and no less than the truth. While I'm sure, at least in my head, that it's NOT going to kill me, it still feels like it's ripping me apart when it happens. Even miscarrying didn't hurt this much.
Speaking of miscarrying, my stomach size is the main thing - aside from the pain - that made the doctor take me seriously, when I was so sure that she wouldn't, so I suppose I should be grateful for such a visible symptom. Instead, I'm just pissed off, because I look like I'm seven months pregnant with twins.
You wanna see? 'Course you do.
Before and after - early winter (maybe November? December?) vs now. The before was taken at my previous plumpest, after I put on thirty pounds when I had the strep. Until now I had never in my life had a stomach that stuck out further than my breasts. And no, I haven't been pigging out. So, tests. I just have to suck it up and do what needs to be done, which is a skill I should have mastered by now, what with all the practice I've had during this lifetime. Instead I've been sitting here snivelling for the last couple weeks because I feel so ill and apathetic and miserable and tired and boo hoo, I feel so sorry for myself, blah blah blah.
On the plus side, for the run up to the tests I've been having to eat a lot of crap - starch, meat, sugar - because we WANT the problems to be at their worst, so there's a chance something might actually show up. In that way, feeling like shit is a good thing...kind of...because the last thing I want is inconclusive tests. I've had a lifetime of inconclusive tests. And as soon as they're over, at least this round of them, I can start eating raw fruit and veg and seeds and grains, and a little bit of cooked rice and chicken, like a normal person. Normal in my world, anyway.
:)
So that's the image I'm holding onto. Get it done, and then I get to throw the chips and pizza out the window and say hello to pineapple and pumpkin and pomegranate, which I've missed a lot.
Assuming I don't die of fright and disgust today or tomorrow.
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