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Overall Health Cannot Be Good Without A Good Gut Health.
Time for a real change after two surgeries. I share my research, present a gathered understanding of the changes needed to become healthy from IBD
When Crohn's intensifying.
Things got worse. Way worse. I couldn't eat, I was constantly constipated, and it steadily got worse. I was transferred to a real specialist with a lot of experience who told me I needed surgery. At first, I resisted, but I gave up after weighing in one morning at 56,7 kilos, feeling I was dying. Every time I sat down, I felt my spine press against the chair. I had no energy and I was in serious pain.
Not eating before the surgery.
The new doctors were more serious, kinder and more mindful of my feelings.
“The best thing you can do,” one of them said. “Do not eat food until the surgery.”
The surgery was 2.5 half months away. They wanted to feed me by inserting a tube in my nose, dripping a nutritious dense, anti-inflammatory drink. I could feel the tube in my throat and I wanted to vomit every minute or so.
Having that tube up my nose, down my throat, letting it drip into the stomach... It was too much for me. I told the doctors I preferred to drink the fluid instead. It was a nasty horrible tasting drink, but it saved my life. I managed not to eat for two months before the surgery.
People getting Crohn's disease are around 30?
I had my surgery a few months after my 30th birthday. I was in pain for a few weeks after, but then I was pain-free for a while. I asked every doctor and nurse at the hospital,
"Please, please tell me what I can eat and not eat." I wanted answers. I wanted a list, clear instructions on what I needed to do to make the disease stay away.
They all told me the same thing, "You can eat whatever you want. This disease has nothing to do with your diet."
They were doctors, and I didn't know better. I trusted them blindly, even though I knew deep down inside, “OF COURSE IT MATTERS.”
Be careful what you eat after the surgery.
I wasn't allowed to eat real food until a few days after the surgery. When it was finally time to eat again (my first meal in 3 months), my brother brought me a kebab pizza and ten candy bars.
In hindsight, I wonder if he wanted to kill me. I know he only meant well; he just didn't understand better. I couldn't eat the pizza nor the chocolates. I couldn’t even look at it. I was nauseous and in pain.
It didn't take long before the pain was gone and I went back to old habits. I have to add something important; I was in a horrible relationship at that time, and in a bad place in life. After only a year, the disease snuck up on me again. This time things got nastier. The inflammation clogged my intestines. Food couldn't pass through my small intestines, and it was a new kind of pain I had never felt before.
In and out of emergency rooms.
I was in and out of the emergency room on a weekly basis. For a month or so, my stomach began cramping after eating. Most of the days I withstood the pain. About five or six times though, pain was the only thing that existed in my world. The pain would be so excruciating that I couldn’t stop hitting the floor with the palm of my hand, begging for the pain to be relieved. First, the doctors helped me empty my stomach. Then they put a needle in my arm and gave me morphine. And suddenly, the pain was magically gone.
Another surgery
The MRI scans had the doctors convinced I had to do another surgery. I was devastated. I won't detail everything that happened between surgery one and two. It's enough to say that those two years were definitely the worst years of my life. My life didn’t suck because I was sick. I think I was sick because my life sucked.
The doctors told me I would probably need to get a stoma bag this time, with hope for removal in the future.
When I woke up from the surgery, they told me the surgery went well and that they managed to close me up without the bag. I was in pain but happy to hear that.
A real change is the only way
After two years of pain and two surgeries, I realized it was time for a change. A real change. I couldn't postpone it anymore. I wasn't young and indestructible. Through the research I had done, I had gathered some simple understandings that I will share with you here. I will present a much longer list of does and don'ts later.
- Don't eat bread. Or at least stay away from gluten.
- Stay away from dairy.
- Stop stressing.
- Let go of your worries.
- SLEEP. Oh my God. During that period of sickness, I used to wake up in the middle of the night to work!
- Stay away from sugar
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