When I was little and we had jellybeans,
(everyone should mistrust stories that start out like this, normally, because they either evoke this air of starving gentility and Scarlett O'Hara beating her fists into the earth, or your grandma talking to you about something while you watch television most un-surreptitiously over her shoulder, in the days before you learn to appreciate things like that, but this story is actually nothing like that! It's good! Find out! Keep reading!)
I would pretend they were pills that I had to take, to cure whatever wasting Romantic Illness I had contracted. Mom says that any amount of actual medicine taken in such quantity would've been fatal in and of itself. I still maintain the potency of the pills was quite inadequate for the ferocity of my pains. And the bag of jellybeans or mini-eggs or fruit snacks would gradually flatten, and I'd run around outside for about five hours.
The weird thing is that these days, when I take my handful of actual weaponized pharmacologicals, I know my liver and spleen and whatever other gizzardy sweetmeats filter me out are rotting away inside under the chemical overload, and I still (sort of, somewhere, parenthetically) enjoy the takin' of the pills.
There is something too false about a confession like this - it feels TOO confessional, but (unlike a little girl who can't help spilling the beans about Mom's Christmas present stashed in the garage) contrived. But it's troooo.
(Now would be a good time to tell you I'm planning on printing this out and sending it to Post Secret. Damn. It isn't short and snappy and sloganified enough for that. Maybe with extra small font...)
The after-Easter jellybean sale will get me through this hard winter, and I'll never go without treatment again.
Heck, I took somewhere around 25 pills per day when I still had my colon. The CCFA did a study and found that a majority of UC patients are non-compliant with their medication regimes. That might have something to do with the amount of pills we have to take.
ReplyDeleteI hope you find some medicine or surgery that helps you feel better soon.
I'm interested in keeping my colon as long as I can, but I do get nervous about the amount of chemicals that go into my body daily.
ReplyDeleteBut UC encourages (for me) a very day-to-day attitude about life. It's not like I expect to drop dead (oh the thrill), but I try to enjoy the "feeling better" days.
I hate to sound anti-colon, but I am. It's a useless organ. It does nothing other than store waste and absorb water. The small intestine will adapt and store water, and the bag does a much better job of storing waste than my colon did.
ReplyDeleteThe thing with UC is that the colon is a ticking time bomb. That's why I had the surgery. It'll either develop toxic megacolon (major life threatening event), or colon cancer (ditto).
Whether medication works or not really depends on the type of colitis you have. Medication can usually control procritis. It sometimes controls left-sided colitis. And it rarely controls pancolitis.
I forget the exact number, but something like 60% of pancolitis patients are steroid dependent, and have surgery within two years of diagnosis.
I heard "you don't want to do that" about surgery from my family right from the moment of diagnosis. I think people place way too much value on something that is essentially the biological version of a sewer pipe.