Big big changes!

As always, it has been quite a while since I blogged here last. I can't say I realized it was almost a whole year ago, but life gets in the way and blogging falls to the very bottom of the list. Life slowed down a bit in the fall, and I started thinking about a topic for a new post. Since I've been doing well, it's getting harder and harder for me to come up with topics that will be relevant to the people that end up here and read my posts. I know you guys are struggling to make sense of what your body is doing to your life. I don't want to write over and over again about how well I'm doing or how it's almost like I don't have IBS anymore. I can remember how hard that would've been for me to read during all those years where I was so sick.

But the truth is, my IBS was backing down. Around the time I started thinking about blogging again, I had been off the daily Imodium for almost 8 months with hardly any relapse in symptoms. My gut had started spasming again with certain foods, and I was having some loose stools, but I very rarely had any urgency. I had my scheduled poop every morning and it was always tolerable. I still don't know what changed that caused this stretch of amazingness for me. I had another stretch like this during high school when I got to live a completely carefree life- I got to eat whatever I wanted and not worry about where I was going to go to the bathroom if my stomach started acting up. I never made it to that point in this last year when I was feeling good, but it was still a similarly spontaneous remission.

This time was especially strange because I was going through an emotional time in my life. We had made some very big decisions and started to put some stressful plans in place. Usually when I'm stressed out, my gut gets very unhappy, but it was smooth sailing up until mid October. Then I started getting urgency again and almost every stool was very loose. Suddenly things I was able to eat the week before were major triggers for my IBS. Soon enough, my GI issues weren't the only symptoms and it hit me that this might be bigger than IBS.

Has anyone guessed it yet? Yep, I'm preggers.

I can't remember if I've talked about it much on here in the past, but holy cow was I adamantly opposed to having kids in the past. I went through a short period when I was 19 when I needed a child right then and there. I remember going home and telling my now husband we needed to get married that weekend so we could start having kids. Looking back, I cannot believe how extreme that need was, and I'm so happy we didn't act on it! Over the years between then and now, that definitely calmed down and we started to logic out having kids. We made a pros and cons list, I researched how it could affect IBS, and we had many, many discussions about it. We would check back in with each other about every 6 months about it and make sure each of us still didn't want kids, look over our pros and cons list, and plan to talk about it 6 months later. To us, it was always a decision that had to be thought through as carefully as buying a house or changing a career. It never seemed like the right plan for us. And I was absolutely terrified of pregnancy since there was a high probability of me throwing up at some point and it making my IBS worse.

Enter our pseudo-nephew. He just turned a year old a couple of months ago. When we found out our best friends were expecting, the first thing out of my mouth and in my husband's head was, "We have to start soon so they're close in age!" We looked at each other with crazy eyes like, "WTF? When did we both suddenly start wanting kids?" I thought it was another crazy hormonal rush and that it would pass. So we went back to what we knew- our pros and cons list and our long talks. We decided that this had to have come from somewhere, so I started reading blogs people had written about having kids instead of ones people wrote about deciding not to have kids. I also bought a book called All Joy And No Fun. After reading that book, I realized that all the cons on our list didn't mean much. If I looked at all of the annoying things our furbabies do day in and day out and didn't take into account how much joy they bring us, I would've never adopted them. We decided to start thinking about maybe having kids for a while and see how that felt. Well, it felt really good, pretty scary, and definitely like it was the right idea for us at the time.

Over the course of a year, we slowly came around to the idea and decided to take the plunge. Well, it worked lol. I found out I was pregnant in October, so I'm just over halfway through my pregnancy. When I found out I was pregnant, I just screamed, "What the fuck?!" over and over and over. I was terrified. It took me a couple of days to be excited about it because I couldn't stop worrying about how nauseous I might get and what if I puked and what was going to happen with my IBS??

I promise I meant to get to the part most of you guys care about a lot faster, but I feel like this is enough text for one blog post! I'll talk about how pregnancy has been for me so far in the next one. If I don't post soon, please hold me to it! Life has gotten pretty crazy around here, so I might need the reminder.

Routines

I've been a worrywart lately, and I wasn't really sure what I was so nervous about until now.

Obviously, building a house is a very stressful thing, but so far I've been having fun with it. It's given me something to do and, more importantly, something exciting to save for finally. The whole affording it thing is always in the back of my mind, but, for the most part, it hasn't been a huge issue so far. But today it finally hit me that the part of the building process that has me freaked out is not the building at all- it's what happens after the house is built. We move in.

Yay! Exciting! Right? Wrong!! Being someone who has lived their whole life with IBS, I have grown very accustomed to my routines. I believe they are what has given me a mostly normal and predictable life. I don't want to get sick? I eat the same meals over and over and over again until food disgusts me and then pick another. I have a bad day? I spend the entire day at home in my bed, steps away from the same, comfortable bathroom I've used for 5 years with my meds all in a row downstairs in the medicine cabinet.

To any normal person this would seem childish. They'd think, "You grow up and move on. New things happen and you adapt to them," but being the so not normal person I am, I'm worrying about how I'm going to feel in my new bathroom. Is there going to be room for my emergency meds in there? Am I going to feel cramped? Our bed is going to be flipped, so my side will now be facing away from the bathroom, so am I going to be able to make it to the bathroom quickly in the middle of the night? Where am I going to put my meds so that I can find them quickly? And then there is ALL of the other routines that I've set up for myself in our current house that don't have to do with IBS. Where will I set my stuff when I come home from work? Where will we pile up the mail? Where will the dogs leashes go? Will I get so stressed out about all of the changes and cause an IBS flare up?

This should be such an exciting time in my life and while it is in some respects, I just can't get this nagging feeling out of my brain that the first year or so is going to be super stressful while we try to make new routines for ourselves in our new space.

There is, of course, another side to the story. We're getting a new fridge that will have so much more room for fresh food, and we'll have plenty of room to cook now. This could mean more home-cooked meals tailored to my diet. The dogs will have a fenced backyard to get all of their energy out so they'll be less annoying inside with us.

I just can't wait for them to get started building the house so I can start to visualize where I'm going to put everything and how I'm going to do my daily routines in the new space. I keep saying that I wish we could just fast forward 6 months and have it be done so I can stop worrying about what may be, but I don't know if I'm ready. I need to break down all of my routines and see if I can make it work in the new house. I just hope my IBS is up for the challenge because it's going to be a stressful 6 months while I get it all figured out.

Have any of you ever dealt with a move or something where you had to switch up your normal routines? How did you deal with it?

My diet lately

I need a better way to keep track of time. Without tests and projects due, rotations are throwing me off. Since pretty much all I have to do is show up to my rotation site, there isn't too much to base the movement of time off of. I can't believe it's been almost a month since my last post.

I wanted to post tonight about what I've been eating lately because I've recently realized how horrible my diet is. So here it is:
-Bagels with peanut butter
-Cereal
-Healthy Choice Garlic Herb Shrimp frozen lunch
-Smart Ones Fettuccine Alfredo (I'm cutting this out as it's done more bad than good lately)

Did you get that? That's it. There are some random, snack-like foods I eat like Ritz Crackers with peanut butter or Wheat Thins, but that's about all I can handle lately. How sad is that? I usually end up having a bagel & peanut butter for breakfast and dinner every day and my Garlic Herb Shrimp for lunch. Every.single.day. EVERY F*CKING DAY.

I don't express my anger very often on here, but it is SO exasperating to have such a limited diet. I'm sure I could expand it somewhat, but A) I'm anything but a cook, so I don't know what else to try and B) I'm so afraid of something going horribly wrong after trying something new. If I had more time off to experiment, I would, but even though I have Friday and Saturday to try out new things, I've been sick or feeling sick every weekend.

I know for a fact I'm not getting enough calories or nutrients which is depressing. I got so close to my goal weight of 140 (I'm 5'10.5") but then started going back downhill again after I started having more episodes. Now I'm hanging out around 130. I don't like looking or feeling this thin. While people always ask me what I'm doing and then ignorantly say, "Well I wish I could have IBS so I could be that thin," I would give anything just to be able to gain some weight without making myself feel like hell.

I'm loving the Imodium because I don't have diarrhea anymore except around my period and when I forget to take it, but the other IBS symptoms are killing me. The gas pains/explosions are unbearable most of the time, and I still just get that sick feeling after eating something bad. Even though it doesn't end with diarrhea anymore, I still get the feeling that it's going to happen.

I need to take the time to sit down and find more meal options to add to my diet, but with Career Day for my pharmacy school coming up in a couple weeks, I'm too busy freaking out about the SIX interviews I have that day to make time for it or to have time to deal with the consequences of trying something that doesn't work out.

I'm just so tired of having such a boring diet. Does anyone have any tried and true meal choices that don't cause a ton of gas or diarrhea?

IBS thoughts

I'm sitting here eating breakfast, and I just realized what I was thinking about.  I was thinking about all of the things I had left to do to get ready for work and worrying about how much time I have left after all that to go to the bathroom. Do normal people worry about things like that?

Thanksgiving- IBS style

This year I decided I was going to try a little bit of everything- except the sweet potatoes, blech. I put a little bit of everything on my plate, a lot of mashed potatoes & gravy, and started eating.

I've had a few rough days. It's the time of the month right now and, like always, it's messing with my IBS, so I knew I had to take it a little slow. I'm not sure if I was just really nervous about eating normal food that I don't usually have or what, but about 5 bites in I started feeling pretty bad. Burning in my lower intestines, urgency, bloating & a little nausea. Luckily A was there to keep me calm, and I was able to just sit there for about half an hour while everyone else finished eating. After that, my stomach just continued to be really uneasy for the rest of the day.

I ended up having to skip the last of 4 houses we were supposed to visit...my aunt Lisa's where my dad's family was having Thanksgiving. This absolutely sucked because my uncle's family was in town- I hardly ever get to see them & hadn't seen them since my grandma's funeral earlier this year.

Needless to say, I spent the evening on the couch with my heating pad going. This morning I woke up better, but my stomach has still been pretty iffy all day long.

Somehow, even with only eating what little I did, I still gained a pound! Now if only I could keep it on :)

Gaining weight & ending the fear

Obligatory "I'm such a bad blogger" paragraph! School has been keeping me ridiculously busy, I've taken on almost double the hours I've been working, and well, I guess I just didn't really know what else to say on here.

You know how when you go out somewhere & get really bad service? What do you want to do when you get home? Give the restaurant a really bad rating & a critical review, of course! No? Well, maybe that's just me. What I'm saying is that when things are good, there's not much to say. But when they're bad, there just isn't even enough room to get everything out! Since I've been feeling better, I just didn't really know what to post about on this blog.

On my other blog, I've been participating in Nablopomo which has taught me to pull topics out of my ass when I have absolutely nothing to talk about. Who benefits here, you guys, of course! ;)


Ok, to the actual post. If you're like me you have a bad relationship with food. You might even fear it like I do. I just cross posted a post (see below this one) I wrote for my other blog about worry. As I eat, I'm constantly worrying about what's going to happen once the food starts getting digested. Will my body be able to handle it? Am I going to have to rush to find a bathroom soon? The thoughts are endless. Wait, check that- they WERE endless. But, honestly, after reading only half of this book, I worry so much less about how the food's going to affect me & I eat...you know, like a normal person. The thoughts are still in the back of my mind, but I don't let them control how I eat.

This fear of food has had some pretty bad effects on my health. Since this bout with IBS started, I've lost 15-20 pounds that I haven't been able to put back on. At the end of last semester, I was feeling so weak & kind of losing hope of ever feeling normal again. That's when I decided to go see a nutritionist. Obviously, after fearing food for almost 4 years, I'd forgotten how to eat like a normal person. As hard as I was trying to put the weight I had lost back on, I just couldn't do it. I mean- what is there to eat other than cereal, rice & pasta? I sure as hell couldn't remember.

Seeing the nutritionist might have been my best decision in the past 4 years. She gave me two measly pieces of paper that have changed my life. I'm now only 5 pounds away from where I want to be & I feel great! She gave me a simple list of foods (you can find it here- it's a link to a PDF file that you can download) grouped by type that are calorie dense. I found that I'd been eating the same types of food, but I'd been choosing the ones with hardly any calories. I started picking foods that I knew weren't trigger foods from this list & tracking my progress on Calorie Counter.

Even if you're not trying to gain weight, there are some great options on here to remind you about healthy foods to try out. Try to eat as big of a variety from this list as you can to help train yourself to eat normally again & develop a healthy relationship with food. I've been really working hard at trying to put an end to my fear of food & gaining weight since May, and it's been tough. After eating like I did for so long, it took a while to get to the point where I could open the pantry & pull out something I'd never tried before instead of just reaching for the cereal.

You might be at the point I was just a year or two ago. You might feel like there's absolutely no hope. That you're going to be stuck at home, next to your bathroom, just in case. Or that you're going to die eating only cereal & rice. One good thing about IBS is that it usually cycles. As bad as it might be now, it will probably get better. Oh great, now I sound like those movies- "It gets better," but it really does. Maybe in a few years I'll feel like absolute shit again & basically be chained to my bed, but I'm not going down without a fight again.

I really hope you guys can take something away from that food list like I did. And seriously, if you feel any type of stress when you eat, buy that book & do the exercises inside. If you don't have the money right now, at least just start a worry journal. Simply writing down every single thing I worried about (you can bet my hand cramped up quite often) made me realize how pointless it all is- completely unproductive worry- & that it's only making things worse.