Determined To Heal

Patience is a spiritual practice.

Recently I wrote about patience as one of the gifts of illness. As difficult as it is to bear the pain, the discomfort, the distress and the deprivation, we grow through these kinds of experiences. I know, it is hard as hell sometimes. We want ease. We want rest. We want peace of mind. We are human, of course we do! And yet our plight is not without fruit. We stretch our patience muscle in ways we never thought possible. We learn about ourselves.

There have been times in my life in which I was not allowed to eat anything at all. The doctors in the hospital forbade me from eating food for weeks at a time because any food at all could have triggered my severely inflamed colon to burst. They decided to give me intravenous food, parenteral nutrition. But I had tiny little veins and the radiologists had a heck of a time getting the “main line” (or pic line) into my arm. I remember one time it took 8 attempts to get the line in. Each attempt was so painful, near unbearable, I wanted to give up. My upper arms were lined with black and blue marks. And yet I made it through that horrific procedure several times.

Then there were the baby food years. My intestines were so sensitive, even after my colon was surgically removed, that I ate only the blandest of foods: rice, pasta, eggs, baby food, tofu, and a little fish (I did not know at the time that I could not tolerate gluten and soy!) for years. Vegetables, beans, lentils — all of those foods were way too fibrous for my sensitive gut. So I ate baby food veggies, maybe one jar a day. There were a few months in which I juiced carrots and beets (and now I can’t tolerate carrots or beets). My physicians encouraged me to drink Ensure, which is a protein drink. I drank hundreds of cans of Ensure and held my nose while it went down. The smell of Ensure now makes me feel nauseous!

There were so many challenges to living with Crohn’s colitis. Sometimes I didn’t make it to the bathroom in time. Sometimes my bowel movements sounded like explosions in public bathrooms, while my colleagues were also taking care of business. I had to explain to friends and colleagues why I couldn’t eat so many foods. I had to ask for special foods. I struggled to get a good night’s sleep and worked full days after tossing and turning in pain throughout the night. There was a year in which I did not sleep through the night on any of the 365 nights. There were years in which I meandered between depression and anxiety. Was it easy? No! Did those experiences change me? Absolutely!

More