High Tension, Low Tolerance

The past few years I have been experiencing a decreasing physical tolerance to many things. I suppose it's a consequence of age in some ways, but I've also got this digestive-disease monkey on my back which makes things worse.

My tolerance for alcohol greatly decreased at some point during 2005. I estimate this, as it is between the binges that characterized my senior year of college and the times I started getting uncharacteristically sick in 2006 after drinking only a fraction of what I had drank in times past. I had only vomited once before, but began doing so a bit more often until I finally gave in and changed my drinking habits. Even then, I still had some digestive troubles.

My tolerance for medicine seems to have always been low, as I can't remember a time that taking allergy medicine didn't make me loopy. These days, the effects are less fun and more nauseating. New medications often give me nausea, and I can't take Vicodin for more than a couple days before the nausea just becomes too much. No risk of addiction there, I suppose.

Sadly, my tolerance for gore has dramatically decreased over the past several months as well. Not that I ever won "Poker Face of the Year" while watching a gory movie, but at least I could handle watching it. While I can still tolerate it, I feel that my body is less delighted to withstand not only the violence, but the suspense in horror films.

I was watching HIGH TENSION the other night, which I've seen before. To say I was watching it is a little misleading, as much of the time I was often doing something else or on my computer as I listened to what was going on. This is not behavior I reserve for horror movies, I often do it just because I like to multi-task, and a good movie is nice background while doing other chores. It makes it feel less like work. However this time, I think I did purposely do it.

That stress which feels so much like riding a roller coaster, and the revulsion at the sight of blood is no longer tolerated very well by my body. I find it really unnerving, because I am still very much a fan of horror. If this keeps getting worse, how am I to continue enjoying my favorite genre?

Then again, maybe like any medicine if I keep exposing myself to those feelings my sensitivity will settle back down again.

I talk about my health and body way more than anybody else I know. You have to understand that it's on my mind every single day. Maybe as time goes on and I adjust to it I will be more accepting and be able to resist letting it take over my life. But it's still very fresh and young, and like the physical healing that has to occur, the emotional healing takes a lot of work, time and patience.

I promise that the next blog I write will not be about my health... will not touch upon it at all. I'm even sick of hearing myself write about this. Let's move on!

The High Price of Weight Loss

I don't really talk about weight that often, although perhaps more often in recent years than any other time. It's kind of an embarrassing topic because I've been overweight ever since grade school. There were a few years when I was really young when I was pretty normal. But combine a lack of knowledge about healthy eating habits with an addictive personality (and possibility an oral fixation) and well... I ate quite a bit, without doing much physical activity.

I tried and tried during my teenage years to lose some weight, but I was often not a happy child which made it difficult to change my habits. It was a cycle really, my social life sucked because I was fat/miserable, and I was miserable because my social life sucked, and I stayed fat because I was too miserable to change my eating and exercise habits.

I met my share of ridicule because of how I looked, although it mostly died off in high school. It was replaced with an invisibility syndrome that has stuck with me even now. It was like I didn't exist to most of the people I went to school with, which is funny because I was hard to miss.

Over the years I tried various exercise tapes, machines, made small changes to my diet. It wasn't really enough, and by the time I got to college it stopped mattering because I met my first boyfriend. He didn't seem to care how I looked, and loved me all the same. We ate junk food all the time because, well, we were college students. And I didn't feel a pressing need to watch my weight, although I did casually at times.

When we broke up, all bets were off. There was a time when I wasn't eating much, but I drank in place of food. That gave way to being too miserable to care, and perpetuated my habit of eating whatever without thinking about its consequences. One day during the summer after I graduated from college, I saw that I had reached 220 lbs and freaked out. I joined Weight Watchers, and overall lost about 30 lbs on that. It was the first time in my entire life that I had actually lost weight.

It wasn't long after this weight loss that I started to notice that I might have a lactose intolerance. In fact, it may have coincided. Now it's worth mentioning at this point that I had had digestive issues for most of my life. It was constipation when I was younger, which eventually turned to a tendency towards looseness during college and eventually occasions of diarrhea in the years after. I've had all sorts of abdominal pains, cramps, gas, weird sensations, nausea. I suspect that I've had irritable bowel syndrome for a long time.

Was this what led to the lactose intolerance? Maybe. But knowing what I do now, I actually suspect that the lactose intolerance was a sign of the beginning of the end, so to speak. I think it was the first sign that my body might be set up for Inflammatory Bowel Disease. If I really want to stretch it, I could say that there might have even been signs back in college when my boyfriend and I broke up. I do remember feeling as though something inside my body was changing simply from all the heartbreak and stress.

In any case, I believe-- but have no hard evidence to back it up-- that up until October of 2006 I was protected from the possibility of my IBD being triggered, and that I was protected by cigarettes of all things. My parents smoke, and I did from the ages of about 17 through 24. Five months after I quit, I got a stomach flu and have been experiencing IBD symptoms ever since.

There are many other people with Ulcerative Colitis-- one form of IBD-- who have similar stories where their disease was not triggered until after they quit smoking. My doctor is not totally sure that I have that form yet, but I suspect that I do.

Talk about paying a high price for something positive-- there's research out there that suggests it's the carbon monoxide in cigarette smoke that prevents inflammation. Let's see, I can either get lung cancer/emphysema/chronic bronchitis OR a chronic auto-immune disease that produces random flares of bloody diarrhea that will increase my chances of acquiring colon cancer, among other things. Hm! What a choice.

For now, my disease is under control. But I believe my IBS has been exacerbated by the inflammation, and that whatever damage that was done to my colon is keeping a few stray symptoms hanging around. I definitely can not eat whatever I want to anymore without paying for it, whether I pay sooner or later. My doctor officially says that even if a food makes me feel sick, it's not doing any damage-- but he has to say that because scientific research has not proved that certain diets help or hurt this disease. Me, I'd rather not eat something that makes me feel like I have a flu or sends me running to the bathroom first thing in the morning. Craziness, I know.

This means that I've been avoiding a lot of foods. Anything difficult to digest, anything too high in fat or fiber, almost all dairy, caffeine, alcohol, sugary, even limiting my amounts of carbonated soft drinks. It doesn't mean I don't ever eat those things, but I certainly don't have them very often. Furthermore, the things I do eat I eat less of. I'm hoping that one day I will be able to eat more normally again, but I know that I'm going to have to be patient and give my body the time (and resources) it needs to heal.

During the 6 or 7 months that I was first sick I lost quite a bit of weight. Not as much as others, since I suppose my disease was not as bad-- but a good 15 pounds. Since I've been on medication to control it, I've lost another 10 pounds. I don't know if that indicates that my disease is not entirely under control, or that I'm not absorbing nutrients properly, or if it's just a consequence of eating much healthier than I have in a long time. But as long as I'm not feeling too bad and am not getting sick like I was last year, I'll assume it's healthy weight loss.

I haven't weighed in at 165 (where I am now) since high school. Hell, I'm pretty sure I weighed more than that for at least part of high school. Is it worth it? Not really. It's too high a price, and I'd take the weight back if it meant I could give away the disease and all its physical damage. I think anyone who has IBD would agree with me.

It's a serious disease, and chances are it will get worse whether sooner or later. People who know me have had to hear me talk about it much more than I'm sure they've wanted to. But it's the sort of thing that really does affect your entire life, and it takes strength to resist letting it take over and limit your existence. In fact, it can ruin some people's lives just from the obscene cost of treatment, hospital bills, etc. I talk about it because it's not talked about enough, and the rates of people diagnosed with this disease keep rising. Nobody ever got better research, medications, treatments and-- most of all-- a cure by staying silent.