Yesterday was hellish, not all of it, well not until just about 11am. I had woken feeling as fine as I ever do, I wasn’t in anymore pain than normal, nor did I feel ill, everything was just average. So the day started as any other day and I worked my way through all the things I normally do, then it just not long after I had chased Adam out of bed the pain began, my stomach was in pain not just in the normal places but as many places as it could find to possible make ache. There are a million miles of the difference between the pain I normally live within my guts and the typical what I would call a stomach ache and that was what I had a good old fashioned stomach ache. It kind of shocked me as I actually can’t remember when I last felt anything like it, but there it was and I recognised it like some distant cousin to my recent life, I knew it, but I hadn’t met it for years. Every time I moved around or twisted, it shouted back it’s presence and over the first hour, it woke up the nastier side of spasms and intense pain and refused to shut up regardless what I did. It was the combination of the two that made yesterday a place I wasn’t happy to be at all. Oddly it also answered a question I was asking yesterday, as the pain rose, my interest in doing anything slowly but surely disappeared, all I wanted was to just do nothing. Not only did my desire to be creative vanish, but my desire to do anything at all, disappeared along with it, leaving behind it the numbness I normally feel towards anything outside my routine. I know I wanted an answer to how I had changed so much so quickly, but to be honest I would rather have been left wondering.

The last few days I was on a high, no need to guess why that was, my pain levels were average or slightly below and life had a zing to it that has been missing for a long time. I can only assume that all those good happy chemicals that good news pumps around your body ran out at around 11am yesterday. The stomach ache, that I still have this morning, I am reasonably sure is down to the Psyllium starting to work on me and actually producing what I would call a more normal reaction in my guts than I have felt in a long time, although nothing has actually happened yet, but I’m taking that ache as a good sign. The bad side is, of course, that pain has a horrid habit of breeding pain and the spasms that cause them. Within just a couple of hours yesterday, I went from feeling really good to wanting to crawl into my bed and disappear into sleep, which is exactly what I did.

The last five months of living in pain all the time and never getting down to a level where I could ignore it, has left me with such a dulled view of life that I had forgotten what it was like to be on a high. I had forgotten how things used to be, a mix of good and bad, what I was calling a good day, was worse than I feel right now, yet after that window of good, today feels terrible, but I still know it isn’t. I knew that I had made a million adjustments in the past 14 years, but it appears that just as you forget how childbirth feels, you also forget how it feels to just be alive and as normal as everyone else out there living their lives today. It is almost like you are walking upstairs against an elevator that is going downwards, at times you can feel as though you are holding yourself steady on the same step level, but the reality is you are dropping down just that tiny little bit each day. You don’t feel the downwards slip, so every day feels like the one before, only an outsider observer could actually see you gradual slipping below where you started, but you feel nothing different at all. I suppose if we did we would all start to panic, start to fear what was happening to us, it so subtle that unless something brings our attention to it, like an incredibly vivid memory or a reminder from somebody else, we just keep climbing at what we see as a totally steady state. In the last five months, I didn’t need that outsider, I could feel myself being completely unable to remain on that same step level, I was slipping lower and lower on the stairs and feeling every single dip and yes I was beginning to panic.

When I crashed yesterday, it reminded me of how I used to be when I was still working, one minute fine, the next screaming inside to go home and leave it all behind. When you don’t do anything, don’t have those things that test us all in normal daily life, you loose those wildly dramatic crashes, yes I do still get suddenly tired, but not in the way I used to, it used to be like someone flicking a switch, one second fine, the next flat and out. I came home from the hospital mentally skipping, not physically, that might have been asking too much, but mentally I was on a high. Even my tired body couldn’t fight against it, my mind wasn’t going to let anything else win. It’s amazing just how your mind can override everything else, physically I was tired, physically I had to sleep for three hours that afternoon, but my mind stopped the fatigue from hitting in it’s normal way following an outing, that override has ended. Today, I am tired, I am in pain and on top of that I have a stomach ache, but I am no longer scared, that one small high is still there as if nothing else totally useful came out of Tuesday, I left my fear behind me. A week ago if I had had this much pain and with this stomach ache on top, well I would have been waiting for the point I needed to call an ambulance, today, I am just working my way through it as I used to do before the whole thing went mad. That is another thing that is on those steps with us, not just our general health and physical abilities, but our ability to manage pain. Oddly though it seems to work in a totally different way, as your ability to manage pain grows at an equal rate to the one you are going downwards. A year ago I would have been waiting for my insides to explode if I had been in this much discomfort and pain, today I can not just handle it, I can also continue with my day.

I added in the peppermint oil yesterday, almost as soon as it arrived just after midday I took the first gel capsule. They are supposed to be able to pass deeper into your intestine before actually disintegrating, getting the oil into your intestine rather than your stomach. I was, therefore, a little surprised when I woke from my nap at 4pm to find that when I burped, I could taste the mint. I had my normal mug of soup about an hour later and was even more surprised to find at around 7pm I could still taste the mint, despite not having actually taken anymore. I didn’t take a second one as I wanted to see how long I could still taste it and be sure it wasn’t going to cause any new problems, but mainly it was simply out of interest. Somehow I don’t think I should have been tasting it 7 hours later, but mind you garlic can do something very similar. As of today, peppermint oil is now to be taken three times a day and is sitting in my pill stash in the living room, along with my booster pills and anti sickness pill, as I really don’t want to have to make an extra trip to the kitchen just to take them. I did try a Psyllium milkshake yesterday, but it didn’t work, coconut is not strong enough a flavour to cover it. I am going to try chocolate when I do my next shop, I think if I buy Coco powder and make up a base mix of strong Coco, which has to be mixed originally with warm milk to make it break down into a paste, once chilled in the fridge it might just do the trick. I have also come up with a few other ideas to test out and see what happens, the more I am coming up with the more sure I am that I really can bring it into my diet without a total disaster occurring.

Read my blog from 2 years ago today – 24/05/13 – Finally I admit it!

It constantly amazes me just how different we can feel in those minutes of lying in my bed heading toward sleep than throughout the day leading up to that time. So often, I find I lying there, sometimes in pain and at others just feeling unwell, not wishing for, but almost expecting that I will not wake the following day. It is a feeling……