Yesterday spiralled downward from when I stopped writing. It was a day that found me trying to deal with my discomfort and pain by eating. I know that is counterintuitive, especially when an over full intestine causes me pain, but I had the drive to eat and I did. I guess it was some kind of comfort eating really, but unlike comfort eating, it isn’t about foods I love, it’s just about food. I guess we all turn to food in the hope it will make us feel better, but it rarely does. I chomped my way through two bowls of Granola, plus two odd tiny amounts of different ones that I snuck in later in the day. I ate about double the amount of nuts I normally would and then still popped the odd extra handful into my mouth while fetching myself something to drink. Food appeared and was eaten. For no other reason other than I knew it was there. Not too surprisingly, it didn’t make me feel any better and by the evening, my diaphragm was 10 times worse than it had been in the morning.

You may have picked up from that my latest faddy diet. I seem to be totally fixed on Granola and nuts just now. Apart from the odd bowl of noodles or some yoghurt and of course, my Psyllium pancakes, they have been my only food for the last month or so. On average, I get fixed on a couple of foods and eat nothing else for about six months at a time. Even though the house is full of loads of other foods, even when I am comfort eating, I still go for those that are in vogue. It is so part of my life, that now I have reached the grand old age of 53, I doubt I will ever change. Oddly, it is partly down to my health that I now have the freedom to eat this way. Other than a period in the 90’s when I had no one else to feed but myself, my food has been governed by others. Proper meals had to cooked and shared and that meant so called normal foods and eating patterns. I discovered a long time ago that my health doesn’t allow me to eat late in the day. I try hard not to eat past 5 pm if I can. Adam doesn’t like to eat until after 7 pm, so our meals are now totally separate. We each cater for ourselves and that means we both get to eat whatever we want. Freedom for my fads again and a freedom I totally love. No matter how much I love it, I can see that it might turn into a huge issue when I am no longer sorting out my own food. I can’t see a nutritionist ever giving my choices of the same thing day in day out for months the green light. And none of my fads has ever ticked all the nutrition boxes.

I never thought about food at all really until I found myself unable to eat quantities. Slowly over many months, I found eating more than a small amount at a time was making me feel ill. Something that is still the norm. If you read back through my blog you will find that I talk often about having a gastric tube. That was how bad it got. For three years, my food was supplied drip by drip over the course of a day. Even speeding the flow up caused me to be ill. When you can’t eat, oddly just like being housebound now means that I don’t miss the outside world any longer, I stopped even thinking about food and had no desire to eat at all. I literally had to wean myself off the tube and back onto food. My food intake may not be the best, but it is more about what I can eat in a day, rather than what I should eat in a day. There is no way that I could manage to eat the physical quantities of what would be classed a normal person food. Out of interest the other day I decided to measure my normal daily food. Since I started eating granola for breakfast several weeks ago, I used a ramekin to measure it out. I took this as my standard measure and it appears that I eat around 4 ramekins a day of solid food, that around 24 fluid oz in volume. Most people would have that in one evening meal, but however you look at it, I consume almost nothing. Clearly, no matter how little, or how badly wrong on the nutrition scale, it’s enough to keep me alive.

I don’t know why but when the nerves in my intestine started to die off, it didn’t come as a surprise. I have known that getting food into me was an issue, getting it out of me joining in as well, well it felt normal. I don’t need to understand all the reason behind why my body does what it does. All I ever want it to know if it will remain this way or if it can be fixed. More and more the answers come back that it will stay this way or get worse. I ate too much yesterday. I did what my body wanted and ate and ate. Today, my body is screaming back at me “Why did you do that?” I felt bad yesterday, today I feel worse and I can’t help feeling it is all my own fault.

I lay in bed last night, unable to go to sleep as I was in pain from my diaphragm and my breathing was a mess. The whole afternoon and evening had been dominated by the feeling of pressure inside me. I knew the pressure, it was the one that nearly drove me nuts in January. Just as tight as my diaphragm was, so was almost my entire lower torso. Trust me it is a miserable feeling and one that wears you down minute by minute. Lying in bed was only making it worse. I was lying there feeling the pain of every breath as it pushed my aching ribs into the mattress. It was the first time that I had ever been that clearly aware of not just the pain in the back of my diaphragm, but every movement it made. No matter how shallow my breathing, there it was pushing painfully in my back. I lay there cursing every extra mouthful I had eaten and it’s added pressure inside me, it was the only reason I could find for the fact I could feel something so strange. Last night was the first time that I have ever been forced out of bed by my back. I got up less than two hours after lying down to take a booster pill, I had no choice. It might have had nothing to do with the food, but I could see how easily a connection could be made and a reason not to eat could appear. Almost as soon as the pain subsided, I found sleep, a sleep I hoped would fix the whole mess. It was a wish too far.

I many not be lying in bed, but every single bit of what I felt last night is here with me right now. If anything, I feel worse. The fact that this has taken over 2 hours to write is partial proof of that. Everything feels wrong. I can see with ease that once I have eventually completed my online activity for today, that bed is exactly where I am heading. Maybe tomorrow will be better.

Please read my blog from 2 years ago – 18/08/2013 – Growing weakness

It’s strange how you can let go of things that many say they could never forgive, but then find your stuck, going round in circles unable to even think the smallest word of forgiveness. I suppose it’s because forgiveness is a two…..