Okay, to begin with, I’m fine.
For those of you who saw my status and went into a blind panic arranging walks
and car washes, (Madison) thank you, but you can stop reading and go find more
pressing and more deserving causes. For the rest of you, I want to tell you a
story.
It’s a love story.
And a medical drama.
Kind of like Grey’s Anatomy but
without the voice over and the doctors having sex in the store room.
This goes back a while. For
those of you who don’t know me intimately, I’ve always been a picky eater. Not
like a five year old who won’t try anything unless it’s been slathered in
catsup, but more like I can look at a menu item and tell if it’s going to make
me sick. Sometimes everything sounds good, sometimes nothing sounds good.
Either way I can pretty much tell what’s going to make me happy and what will
make me friends with the toilet. But sometimes I’m wrong and sometimes I’m
stupid and I ignore my intuition in favor of pizza and ice cream.
After a while I realized that
while being a picky eater was pretty normal, the lengths to which my body
seemed to dislike any food in general was not normal. My family and my
boyfriend encouraged me to go to my doctor, which I did. After three failed
diets and the gamut of liver/blood/kidney tests, I was loosely diagnosed with
stress induced Irritable Bowel Syndrome.
IBS is actually fairly common.
There isn’t a lot that can be done for it. For more severe cases it can be
managed with medication, but for milder cases like mine, one simply adjusts
their diet accordingly.
So no big deal, right? And for
the next few years it was perfectly manageable. Now we fast forward to two
years after the diagnosis to about four or five months ago.
Late March to early April I was
under a lot of stress. I was working two jobs, student teaching, taking
classes, preparing to graduate, dealing with a myriad of personal issues and
some family stuff on the side; so my stress induced IBS was in full swing. Then
I started to notice new symptoms: mild joint pain I dismissed with too much fun
at the gym or standing on my feet all day. The headaches were from doing lesson
plans and studying into the dead of night. The nausea was simply my IBS coupled
with a lack of healthy food options at my school.
But when certain things started
coming out the other end; things that should never come out down there, I
realized that they couldn’t be ignored.
(For those of you who want to be
spared the details, skip ahead to the end. But you’ll miss the best part; this
is a love story after all.)
Blood. At first it was just a
little. But pretty soon there was a lot of it. A lot more than anyone should
ever see in a toilet bowl. What’s worse is that I wasn’t eating much, working
fifty hours or more and loosing blood at an alarming rate. I kept hoping that it
would stop, heal, go away, whatever, but after two or three weeks I knew it was
time to talk to someone.
Let me be clear that the idea of
talking about bodily functions with anyone with whom you are romantically
involved is mortifying. Talking about
blood in your stool is pretty much off limits. Every disease comes with a
stigma and like my father’s prostate cancer, my disease has to do with a part
of my body that rarely sees the sun let alone gets discussed with civility.
But I knew I had to tell him, so
I sucked it up and told Taylor about my poo.
He wasn’t grossed out. He didn’t
dump me for a more civilized, healthier woman. He wasn’t hysterical and
panicky. In fact, he was just Taylor. He held me and kissed me and told me it
was probably nothing, but that we should see my doctor again.
For some reason, talking to your
doctor about what comes out of your butt is actually much easier than talking
to it with anyone else. This is probably because doctors are just supposed to
nod and then tell you what to do to fix it. I went back to my doctor and was
prescribed another plethora of tests, including a stool test. For those of you
who thought a stool test is as simple as taking a dump in a cup, you’re wrong.
In reality it is much more complicated and much more humiliating.
And when I came home and
complained about the stool test to Taylor, he cheered me up with the “Check the
Poo” song from Scrubs.
There’s only so much that a
general doctor can do. So when the tests came back inconclusive, I was sent to
a specialist. Gastroenterology is the doctoring of the digestive tract. We call
them GI doctors (because Butt Doctor is probably no PC.) I went to the hospital
to have a talk with my GI.
I was prescribed a colonoscopy.
These procedures are usually reserved for people in their forties, in
particular men in their forties. For example my doctor has a poster in his
office that reads “If seventy five is the goal, at forty five check the hole.”
I was a twenty three year old
woman getting a test common for men twice my age.
To make matters worse, they only
offer this procedure at two times of the day: Ungodly early and even more
ungodly early. More so, I couldn’t drive myself because I would be under
anesthesia. Both my parents work, so they would be no help. But along came my
super awesome boyfriend who offered to wake up and drive me on my day off.
And no matter how many times I
apologized, Taylor just told me that it was his job to take care of me.
No matter what.
The day before the procedure,
you can’t eat anything other than popsicles and chicken broth (and Jell-o, but
none of the good flavors.) Worse yet, you have to drink this god awful bowel
cleanser which tastes like someone ground up a bunch of grape sweet tarts and
then pissed in it. And you can’t chug it, you have to savor that crap.
Once you drink the stuff, it
starts to work. It’s a bowel cleanser, so it does exactly what you would expect
it to do. I spent most of the night in the bathroom, exhausted and disgusted
with myself. But every time I came out, Taylor was there to wrap me in his arms
and kiss all my fears away.
You drink the bowel cleanser
twice. Once the night before and once four hours before the procedure. So I was
up at oh-dark-thirty to spend a few more hours in the bathroom. This was
coupled with waking up to the news of the Century 16 shooting, so my nausea was
also personal in nature. So while the rest of the country woke up to tragedy
and shock, I was sitting with my boyfriend in a doctor’s office, waiting to
have a scope shoved up my butt.
Taylor stayed the whole time. He
never left. And when I came out, he cuddled me and kissed me and told me I was
beautiful and that he loved me. He didn’t even make fun of me (much) when I
kept flirting with my elderly nurse and tried to get her to tell me where she
got her awesome scrubs. After all that he took me home to sleep off my drug
induced haze.
It takes a few weeks for the
biopsies to come back, but in the meantime was prescribed a suppository (if you
don’t know what it is, look it up.) The medicine helped relieve the initial
symptoms, but it came with a long range of side effects: Nausea, sore throat,
stomach cramps…and my favorite, flatulence.
Oh yeah, lots of farting. This
of course made the idea of going out in public pretty mortifying, but I worried
that this might be the last straw for Taylor. I mean, I’m not the sort of girl
who is too suave to fart in front of her boyfriend, but there’s a pretty big difference
between the little gas giggle and a full blown trumpet every few minutes.
You of course know by this point
in the story that I had no reason to worry.
Taylor did what he always does:
loves me. And even though I feel about as sexy as a wood pecker, he takes good
care of me, telling me that I’m beautiful and that he loves me.
And he didn’t even freak out
when the test came back that I had Chrone’s Disease.
For those of you who don’t know, Chrones is an
autoimmune disorder. Long story short, my stomach and my intestines hate each
other and send out little antibodies like war planes to cause the other one
pain. For my geek friends: my coding is whack.
The disease is perfectly
manageable. And even though it doesn’t exist yet, I will probably see a cure in
my lifetime. In the meantime, I get to start a long regiment of medications,
more tests and more dealing with my insurance. Mostly I get to take shots like
a diabetic (not like an alcoholic) only I have to put the little gun in my
thigh. Taylor and Madison see this as a reasonable excuse for me to wear
miniskirts as often as possible. I have to agree. (I have fabulous legs.)
So tomorrow Taylor has to once
again wake up at the ass-crack of dawn to take me to get X-rays. It probably
won’t be the last time either. I’ll be dealing with this disease for the rest
of my life. Or should I said, we’ll be living with it for the rest of our
lives.
(Those of you who skipped the
details can reenter our story here.)
Taylor is the man that I want to
spend the rest of my life with. If I or anyone else ever had doubts of his love
for me, this story erases them. He is without a doubt the greatest boyfriend in
the history of boyfriends.
For better or for worse.
In sickness and in health.
I know Taylor will love me no
matter how much my insides hate me, no matter how picky I eat and no matter how
much I fart.
And that is true love.
