When the Pain is *Actually* that Bad.
Writing to you from inside the hospital walls.
For the first time today, I’ve shifted my body to a sitting up position. My hair is a mess, my eyes feel kind of blurry, and the only thing I can focus on is the humming and whirring of my IV machine. I’m looking at the Kate Farm nutrition shake beside my ice water and wondering if it’s worth calculating the number of these shakes or shakes like them that I’ve consumed this season.
Today is day 7 of this current admission, and day 14 out of the last 29 that I’ve spent inside of the hospital walls.
My life hasn’t looked like this in a long time.
A long time, which I have been exceedingly grateful for.
But tonight, I’m thinking about then, the in-between, and the place I seem to have gotten stuck upon in right now.
From February 2018 through January 2022, I was in physically the best shape of my life. My Crohn’s disease and other chronic health problems were well managed, and I was living a version of my best life during some of that time.
The last six months to a year have been infinitely more complicated.
And to be honest, during these last few weeks, I’ve been thinking mostly about the sentiment of:
When the pain is actually that bad.
When the pain makes it impossible to breathe.
I know that sounds like a figure of speech, or an analogy or an extreme, but what about when it’s just the truth?
Thats what started this round of admissions. The pain upon trying to eat, upon food getting stuck in my esophagus for days at a time, it became unbearable. Like cry my eyes out claw at my skin terrible.
Then with it came the burning. The acidic erosion. The fear around food of any-kind. Then the lack of nutrients. And the dehydration.
There’s something about the relief of IV medication and fluids when you’ve felt like you were getting closer to circling the drain. Something about feeling like for a minute the desperate things in your body are being well enough taken care of by the things being pushed through your IV line, and for the time being, for the moment at hand, all you have to do is rest. You don’t have to fight to survive, you don’t have to fight for treatment, because at least in this moment, you've found one which surely will lead to the other, right?
To be continued…