Julie's "don't wanna work" challenge

hypochondria

So I am sick AGAIN, or maybe still.  I've been more sick than not sick since we got back from Phoenix, and honestly I wasn't feeling fabulous before Phoenix either.  When I stop to really think about it, the last year or so has been mostly a cocktail of hurry and graduate/hurry and get a real job stirred up with with "wow I feel like crap"  and "I am sooooooooo tired" with a dash of "my stomach hurts" thrown in for good measure.  There's a recipe for a good time don't you think.  Serve it with a side of kid stress and a bowl of marriage and money "issues" and you've got a meal that will take out a clydesdale so imagine what havoc its wreaking on this now 160lb woman (yep, down from 166 lb woman last week--and so it begins). 


I have been through this lovely cycle of illness before and I always get the same answers:  You're depressed, you need to increase you're meds.  You have IBS and you're stress is making it worse.  You have endometriosis, lets get rid of those pesky parts and see if that helps.  You're out of shape, try exercising. The thing is nobody's answer every really fits, and nobody's solution ever really works.  In 2000 I believed the depression people and changed by meds and ballooned back up to 190 lbs almost instantly--it was like you could SEE the weight come back on!!!!! And the thing was my stomach still hurt and I still felt terrible physically, I was just fat (the psych doc took all of her patients off of that med eventually, apparently a diabetes connection?) and not feeling well so we changed meds and I got thin again.  Then it was like you could see the weight melt off and by early 2005 it had melted to 119.  I still felt yucky, and I was losing hair, and my skin looked terrible, and I slept all the time, and now I had no periods (honestly, who complains about this anyway) or almost none anyway, so I agreed to let an OB doc I actually liked take out all my "parts"  BUT apparently my parts had other ideas because on the day they were supposed to come out they surprised me with Audrey.  Ok, technically I suppose she showed up 3 weeks prior, and God probably actually did the surprising but still, a surprising trip to the hospital anyway.  And I improved.  I was sick for the first few weeks of pregnancy and then I wasn't.  I was the best I'd been for a long time.  My food stayed where it was supposed to for the most part, and my hair came back.  I was fat as all get out, but I didn't care, I could eat and actually enjoy it for the first time in ages!  It was awesome.  I had heartburn pretty bad at the end, and a gestational diabetes scare (don't eat a muffin or four muffins before your test) but other than that pregnancy and the 6 months after was the best I'd felt in ages.  And then things started slipping, but it was gradual.  Yes the post-baby weight came off fast, and with almost no effort  but I didn't think too much of it--I had at this point spent a large chunk of the last 5 years running to the bathroom and I wasn't in pain so it was no big deal.  I did go see the doc in 2006 for the heartburn and we did a scope (colonoscopy prep has improved, yay!) and all they found were ulcers and a colon that they didn't even get all the way through, which is apparently no big deal? So I took the nexium samples and went on with my Master's program.  And when I had the "stomach flu" nine times (yeah that wasn't a typo, it was nine times) during my school practicum I just thought I was tired and overworked.      Same when I slept all weekend every weekend during my internship and for days at a time during my school breaks and when I got sick during every break and when, in order to get through internship with no stomach problems I just didn't eat ALL DAY LONG.  I drank coffee and smoked and blamed my sore teeth when I avoided food.  And I collapsed for 10 days after graduation. OK, not literally, I got the first case of strep I'd had since I was 20 and had my tonsils out and it really threw me, I even got a rash ON MY FACE!!!! (I'm sorta vain). But after two different antibiotics I was fine and went back to the day care job, and made sure to function on coffee with no dairy and no food so no problems.  You'd think I'd be thin, but I wasn't, because I did eat at home, and the only things that didn't hurt--like reflux hurt--or go through were the donuts and cookies and cake type things so I ate a lot of them at home.  I even got up and ate during the night because of the painful reflux so I stayed the same size.  The empty stomachs were as painful as the full ones, and I was just blocking it all out and running on empty.  By the time school started even I didn't want to hang out with myself anymore I was so crabby.  And the schedule went to part time, and I tried to take it easier, but mostly I was just sleeping and dragging.  I tried adding easy exercise, like Tai Chi and it helped some, but I had upper respitory problems and ovarian cysts in november and december and january and now again in febuary to go with the stomach stuff.  And I know that I sound like a crazy hypochondriac but darn it something is not right.  I did get new GI doc, and she's listening sort of, she found some new stuff, but she can't tell me WHY any of its happening?  Why do I have gastropareisis?  I'm not diabetic and I don't have celiac, so what's it from?  And if I have fructose malabsorption why can't I eat meat without getting sick?  Why can't I eat fries or chinese food? or peanut butter?  or bacon?  (and the bacon is a huge loss, I LOVE bacon)  and I check labels darn it.  I seem to get sick from saturated fat, not fructose, just throwing that out there since I live in this body.  And why the right side pain and the cysts or whatever it is you've decided the ripping, stabbing pain that you can't actually explain every couple of months is (and NO, you many NOT cut me open and look a fourth time)? and the crazy hormonal stuff--how many periods does a 39 year old need in a month anyway and do my boobs really need to be this big and this sore?  And why, when I'm on massive doses of ADHD meds, do I still want to sleep all of the time?  And again, with ADHD meds at this high of a dose you'd think I wouldn't sound like an Alzheimer's patient half the time, forgetting words and getting lost in the middle of sentences, or asking the same question 3 and 4 times.  I just want answers, or someone to at least listen, and I know that isn't going to happen and its scaring me a little bit.  This is going to sound paranoid, this IS paranoid, but its also unfortunately how things work: 


I have a friend who died, a few years ago, while I lived in MO.  She was younger, and smarter than me (except about boys, her husband may be one of the dumbest, and meanest people I've ever met).  She was a gifted writer and teacher who had the misfortune of having a not great childhood--alcoholic father, mother who abandonded her.  She met a guy who was not her dad who was semi-nice to her and next thing you know she was pregnant and living with his parents. And she didn't feel good, soooooo, they said she was depressed and gave her pills for that.  She had stomach pains so it must be endometriosis, so the loaded her up with hormones, which made her more depressed so they gave her more pills for that and on and on and on, and exploratory surgeries, and then more pills, and more surgeries.  And then they removed her uterus and her ovaries and found out it was actually an autoimmune disease--Crohn's (no wonder her stomach hurt!!!!!!!) and they loaded her up with steroids which helped and then didn't help, so they took out her colon.  At this point her husband had totally won of course, no more career for her,  he could be the "boss".  And then she was dead.  And maybe it was inevitable and she would have had an aneuyrsm on that day even if she'd been given better care by people who hadn't assumed that she was just a depressed woman in a bad relationship who was exaggerating her "female" problems, or if she'd been treated by people who's only options weren't medicate or surgery, but we'll never know, because she died before she was 35 and her son will never even remember that before she had the colostomy bad she was a teacher.