So I'm here this morning and my stomach is awful. You have to understand, it's been fucked up pretty much my entire life. At 13, I had ulcers. Things haven't gotten better. Most everyday of my life there's something wrong with my stomach. Nauseous, bubbling, churning - not to mention the kind of problems no one wants to mention. I never know what the day will bring. I've missed countless days of work, family events, weekend days, plans, movies, etc. because of my stomach. I've been stuck for literally hours in the bathroom for one thing or another. And not infrequently. It hurts all the time. Serious, make-me-want-to-curl-up pain kind of hurt. This morning is one of my even-worse-than-normal days. It was all I could do to get here and now I'm utterly miserable and have hours before I can go home and try to feel better.
Mornings are especially hard on my stomach because it doesn't like mornings. And, more so being rushed or on any kind of time constraint. You can imagine then, that having to get up, run my Love into work, come home, get ready myself and then try to get to work is stressful and most assuredly under the category of both "morning" and "rushed." Driving in, I was fighting gagging - a fun side-effect of my stomach problems is that if I have problems of the....er... not enough variety (or the not at all variety as opposed to the too much variety - both which happen in alteration every couple days), then I start gagging and if I can't get it under control, will throw up. (Or at least dry-heave if there's nothing in my stomach to actually throw-up.)
*sighs*
If it were just one problem, I could address it. Take more fiber in my diet for example. But it's not. It's both and it's a complicated combination as well. Things are never cut-and-dry with my stomach. It quite simply doesn't work. And I don't know what to do about it. No insurance means I can't go for tests and such to try to come to some kind of relief. But, the stomach situation is so bad - and getting worse it seems each year - that I can never be consistent enough somewhere at a job in order to get insurance. I don't know what it is. It's not dairy or anything dietary as far as I've been able to tell - changing what I eat doesn't seem to have any real effect on it. I can eat awful junk food one day and it's fine, but eat it another and I'm sick. Or I can eat healthy one day and be sick, but another be fine. I think my whole digestive system is just fucked up. I think it just doesn't work properly. And I hear about things like IBS and I wonder if it isn't exactly what I've been struggling with all these years. I know the vast majority of people in the world don't go through this. I know they don't feel this way all the time. They can't. If they did, nothing in the world would ever run because everyone would be like me and stuck being ill, sick, and in pain all the time. I wonder if then, there's at least a small group who can understand what I go through - and perhaps enough medical attention to the existence of such problems that perhaps there are options to make things even a little bit better; a smidge more normal. I just don't know how to get the resources to try to help this. It's medical. It's interfering with my entire life. And it's not only not getting better, it's getting worse. It's so frustrating. I'm so helpless to the whims of my body. The two major issues in my life are my migraines and my stomach. Both require far more money, experts and medical exploration then I could ever hope to afford. So I can't even live my life. And that hurts as much as the attacks. More, because I know I'm missing out on so much. From the outside, it all looks fine. And no one can understand how "an upset stomach" or "just a headache" can cripple me so much. But it's more then that, and it can and does. I just don't know what I can do about it or how I can ever hope to fix it.
Anyway, I don't feel well. What else is new. Same old broken record. Even the people close to me are sick of hearing about my stomach. Sick of it being an excuse. Sick of it interrupting life. I can't blame them; they don't feel it everyday. And they just see it from the outside. But being tired of the issue doesn't make it go away. And it doesn't help with the fact I'm in pain all the time. I don't know.
Whatever. No one wants to hear me bitch about this. I just needed to vent.
~ flowers bloom near Memory and Dream
at 5/20/2004 09:36:45 AM ~
~
