Back to the Beginning

I suppose I started this blog when I was at the height of my illness…I couldn’t see myself getting much sicker and it was time for surgery. So by then I was tiny, frail, throwing up, spending much of my time in the bathroom and living on enough pills to probably medicate a small country.

It would be a good thing to go back, a lot of my family and friends knew I was “sick” in a vague sense of the word but really had no idea how it came about, symptoms, what happens at the doctor visits and all that. So let’s dedicate today’s update (and I’m sorry I haven’t been updating as often as I should be) to the past.

I grew up in Southern Alberta and at the age of 19 moved 12 hours away to the Peace Country in Alberta to work as a journalist in a small newspaper. When I say Falher or Donnelly people don’t usually know where that is so let’s just say Northern Alberta. On my own for the first time, in a fabulously hideous furnished apartment in a building that used to be a convent. In fact there were still several nuns living there, but I’m getting off track.

About a year into the job I was stressed, unhappy with work, my publisher was awful to me and I was too young and green to know how to handle it properly. If I had the same treatment today I would definitely quit, hire a lawyer and sue his sorry butt.

It all started with a bad case of diarrhea. As a young adult living on your own of course you eat and drink copious amounts of things you probably shouldn’t. Add to all of that the fact that I’ve loved food from a very young age and have the chubby photos to prove it and I had no cause for concern at first. “Was it the night of partying and then the pizza from who knows when or could it have been the greasy burger and fries and potato chips followed by more partying?” I think this is a conversation most “party age” young adults have with themselves while they’re hanging out in the bathroom at some point or another.

But then the diarrhea wouldn’t go away. I would go to the bathroom on average of 12 or 15 times a day. And food started coming out whole. DON’T PRETEND! I know you all take a gander before a flush. And believe me – you notice when whole bits of food are floating around in there. I’m not talking when you can be sure you’ve had corn and you see it…I’m talking I had a salad and so whole pieces of lettuce are floating around. Okay enough of that, I’m making myself turn a little green.

Finally after about a month of this and starting to lose weight I bit the bullet and made an appointment to see a doctor. I sit down across from him in his office and my opening line is “I go to the bathroom a lot.” Opening the conversation with my doctor was absolutely the hardest thing – no one wants to talk about bums, bathroom habits and poop. Not even with professionals. The doctor booked me a test at the hospital with another local doctor and we went on from there. I continued pooping and then on test day I was wheeled in.

I would like to go on record here and say NEVER get a colonoscopy without sedation. I know they say it’s a routine operation and it’s no big deal and you don’t need it. Bull Pickles! The only people who say this are the sadistic doctors shoving miles of tubing into places that you didn’t know went that deep and the nurses who run the air machine. Because even though the tube is in there, they have to pump in a bunch of air at the same time to “inflate” things to make the view on the camera better. The air machine sounds like a jack hammer and when you’re already sick it’s a nightmare situation. The doctor performing the test was just a general doctor. Not a specialist (another thing I should have fought against but you live and learn) and he asked me in rapid fire a series of questions including things like “do you have bowel movements more than 5 times a day?” “do you see whole chunks of food?” “do you see mucus and/or blood?” and so on. I answered yes to every single question. At the end of the test (it felt like 40 minutes but it was probably only 10 or 15) the doctor told me “you are a mess” and left the room. Leaving the nurse to mop up the tears and get me back into the room to recover.

Oh and how joyous is this? My boyfriend at the time was in the room waiting for me, cause you’re not allowed to drive after the procedure, and at that point with him standing over my hospital bed the nurse announces “you’ve got a lot of air that we’ve pumped in there, it’s very important that you let it out naturally so don’t be afraid to just let it rip.” Kill me…I wish the nasty hospital sheets could have smothered me.

About a week later the family doctor I had initially seen called me to his office and told me it looked like I had a case of ulcerative colitis and immediately prescribed me horse sedatives. Okay I’m exaggerating – I was taking Sulphasalazine – giant yellow pills which is from the family of Sulpha drugs – roughly translated into real English meaning drinking so much water you could drown and turning purple in direct sunlight. Seriously.

I took these pills for my whole prescription and was feeling better. Here comes giant mistake # 2 (right after not demanding to see a specialist) after I was done my prescription I didn’t go see the doctor again to get a refill and did not continue on with proper health care.

Well, I think I’ve exhausted all of you enough for today. Stay tuned for the next update – when I finally got a clue!