Listening to my body – Part 1

With so many things happening to my body at once, I spend a great deal of time discerning between endometriosis pain, ulcerative colitis pain, anxiety, stress and just an off day. I run out of spoons a lot, and I am starting to look at my body with disdain – something I don’t even want to admit to myself. To put this all together Im starting to become unfamiliar with the body Im living in. Truth be told the last year has been one of the toughest emotional roller coasters of my life (even worse than that time my first husband cheated on me). But everything is coming to a head now…

Ulcerative Colitis

I have met with my GI. He has sat with me and taken all of my specifics down. He was wonderful. He listened to me talk about how my body feels over the course of 8 weeks between infusions and agrees with me that they should be moved to every 4 weeks. This should mitigate the symptoms that creep up around week 5. With the looming possible Primary Sclerosing Colingits (PSC) he wants to ensure we do a colonoscopy every year, with intermittent Calprotectin testing and blood work to stay on top of the whole system.

Pancreatitis

He also wants to get to the bottom of my pancreatitis. We talked about the possibility that this could be endometriosis infiltrating the pancreas. His explanation, which I agree is sound, hypothesizes that the endometrial lesions would have to infiltrate deep enough into the pancreas to cause a blockage or some physical inflammatory response for this to be the cause of my elevated (spike in) pancreatic enzymes. That being said he is willing to look into it, have me looked at by a pancreatic specialist and communicate with my endo specialist to have my body examined from different angles/groups of thought.

Endometriosis

Well, see the rest of my body wants to cooperate but my endometriosis is still a stubborn bitch. On Jan 10th I finally meet my endometriosis specialist and will hopefully get clarity on the chronic pain I have down below, the periods that are still happening despite the Visanne, and the diaphragmatic pain that’s a thorn in my side (figuratively and literally).

Leading up to the holidays my endo belly was killing me! I was almost at 3 weeks of the most uncomfortable endo belly. I mean, I went online and had to buy new pants that would allow for the extra circumference I just developed. And with no sight of this going away, I was getting super depressed. Nothing I tried helped. I thought at first it might be soy milk but I took that out of my diet. I am on gluten free, dairy free, sugar free meals so what the heck was causing this? I wasn’t doing anything out of the norm, and I could tell it wasn’t colon inflammation.

On Christmas Day my uterus decided it wanted to give me a full on period – the first one I’ve had in over 8 months. FML! I knew the Visanne wasn’t working as I was still having a ‘cycle’ without the bleeding. Now… this?? Screw Visanne, Im done. I decided to stop the visanne altogether as it wasn’t providing me any help whatsoever. Three days into the bleeding my period pain was way too debilitating and I had to put my thinking cap on. I wasn’t going to be seeing the specialist for another 2 weeks so think fast. I decided that since birth control is usually the first line of defence against period pain, I decided to pop one of my Minovral oral birth control pills. This way I was getting some sort of hormone into my body, despite it also having estrogen there.

My other line of thinking was that maybe visanne – or rather the lack of estrogen – was somehow behind this outrageous endo belly. This theory was based on nothing at all, other than listening to my body and knowing how it might be reacting to certain changes over time. In case my specialist thought this theory was crazy, I catalogued my belly over the course of a few weeks leading up to my appointment.