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Showing posts from July, 2016

Déjà Vu

I've probably had Crohn's disease since high school - which was in the early 90s; I never went to the doctor because I never had major symptoms until I was much older.  I did have mind numbing fatigue and random joint pains through college, but I chalked it up to knee surgery I'd had when I was 14.  Even if it was in the wrong leg...I mean I must have been walking funny to favor the injured side. It wasn't until I was 26, working more than full time hours in the corporate world, that I had blood in a bowel movement.  Ok, if I'm real about it the toilet bowl looked like it was full of kool aid.  It was a lot of blood and it was scary.  I talked to a friend of mine at work who I knew had some digestive problems and asked her what to do.  She had seen a great gastroenterologist at Northwestern and told me to go see him. "Do you really think I need to go?  I'm going on vacation in a few weeks." This was my logic in response to filling a toilet with

No, I Don't Have Gluten Sensitivity

I have a lot of good people in my life.  Since my 20s, I've adopted a "low drama" friend strategy in that I don't have friendships with people who create unnecessary bullshit.  It's a good method, you should try it if you haven't already. I also have a job where I'm constantly talking to people, listening to their stories, sharing parts of mine if it's appropriate (therapy relationships are strange things). What do I mean by appropriate?  When I'm meeting with a client, that hour is their time.  It's about them and what they're dealing with that day.  We're taught in graduate school to establish boundaries for many reasons I won't get into here, but boundaries are a good idea and therapists vary on how strict or loose they keep boundaries with clients.  Like a lot of things in my profession, this is a grey area. I've heard some crazy stories of loose therapist boundaries.  Cray. Zee. Speaking of loose boundaries. I ten

Results Anxiety

I stood and stared into my refrigerator this morning for about 5 minutes.  Not because it's empty except for a lonely bottle of ketchup.  We're fortunate to have food in our house, including a host of fruits and vegetables that I get from the internet (Door to Door Organics).  Because I'm lazy.  Actually it was the bowl of apples that drew my stare.  I love a good, cold apple.  Preferably honey crisp or fuji or granny smith.  Red delicious run too much risk of being mushy, in my opinion. My face when biting a mushy apple. I don't want to eat any more apples.  The thought of eating another apple sends me into a catatonic state, staring into my fridge.  I look around at the other food, most of which is off limits to me right now because I'm still on the elimination diet. My endoscopy wasn't clear.  As my GI doc put it "It's not too bad" but I still have inflammation in my esophagus and stomach, plus some new stuff that I don't really wan

Test Anxiety

T-minus 3 days until my next endoscopy.  You'd think with the sheer volume of times I've been through medical testing, it'd be no big deal.  Yet here I sit, waiting for Tuesday, 9 am, to arrive so I can get my esophagus checked out to see if this diet I've been on is actually working at a physiological level. "Good evening, Clarice."  I want to think it is, I am better.  But I still have some symptoms depending on what I eat - rice, for example, takes a bit to make it down the ol' pipe.  It could be something as simple as there's some narrowing going on from the inflammation I had so I need a dilation, or my gastroenterologist will every-so-carefully stretch my esophagus back to it's normal width with some type of tool that I don't even want to think about.  It probably belongs on Game of Thrones or something. Full disclosure, I've watched about 3 1/2 episodes of GoT.  Enough to hate Joffrey like the rest of the world.  That's a