It started up again last night. My guts have been low-grade bleeding for…a long time. It’s become kind of a fact of life. I’ve come to accept it. I do get mad that it wrecks my RV holding tank sensors, so I can’t tell how full the tank is. I have my work-arounds for that, but still.
I get frustrated that I have absolutely no energy to do the things I love doing: hiking, dancing (my spine gets in the way of that too), dog sports, or anything that requires being up and around and away from a toilet for more than an hour. Shopping leaves me exhausted for days. I put off going out until I’m out of absolutely everything.
Apart from my holding tank sensors, the part I resent most is my hair. It’s falling out. I’ve got a bald spot in front, right above my hairline. I really should see someone about this, but I’m just so damned tired.
Last evening just about sundown I went to take a crap, and whaddyaknow, a big blob of bloody mucus came out. Ugh. Well, thought I, I hope that’s the end of that!
It wasn’t.
True that even a teaspoon of blood looks like a lot when it’s on toilet paper. It is quite the shock.
My first impulse with things like that is to find some alternate explanation. Toddlers, for example, often ended up in my office, accompanied by a red diaper and a panic-stricken parent. Most of the time the culprit was that awful red dye they put in Jello and “red” Koolaid. Excellent teaching opportunity: don’t feed your kids anything you don’t want to see in their diaper! Beets will also cause red diapers, but not as shocking.
I have eaten nothing red of late. Not beets, or red Jello, or even the lovely rare steak I’ve been plotting to burn on the grill.
There’s a bit of dullish pain in my gut, nothing I can’t ignore; and a characteristic tinkling bowel sound that only occurs when I bleed. I once recorded it to play for a doctor, but erased it after my last horror show encounter with the bozos they now call “physicians.” I can’t wait for the robot docs. At least they will hopefully be more objective.
When I started getting frank blood coming out of my poor ass, I considered packing up and heading for the local ER. Then I considered what would happen. Procedures. Possibly admission. A tube in my nose. Antibiotics. Colonoscopy.
You know what? I’ve been there and done that. My body can’t tolerate the steroids they shove at me. I don’t want to get C. Diff. In fact, I want nothing to do with the medical establishment. At all.
I had plans for today: there is a knitting club at the RV park where I’m staying. I wanted to pick the brains of the people who actually know what they’re doing. I’m too damned tired. I don’t seem to have bled enough acutely to bring my hemoglobin down, but I didn’t have to take my blood pressure pill this morning.
I’m tired. I’m grieving the loss of my son. I’m grieving the fact that I never had a real mother, even though I tried desperately to make her into one in my mind. I feel like I lost my family in a fire. But they’re still alive.
Susan Sontag’s book Illness As Metaphor has provided me with a paradigm in which to understand my in illnesses, but not the one she herself offers. Sontag was more about the way society stigmatizes certain illnesses. To my way of thinking, my illnesses are loud metaphors for my inner ecological disasters.
Bleeding Guts= I’m torn up inside
Asthma= I’m suffocated by the people and circumstances I live with
Spine disease= no support
Bipolar= No stability
Etc.
In case you’re wondering, I’ve worked with these metaphors for decades, trying to find some modicum of healing in therapy, NLP, hypnotherapy, support groups, even witchcraft! I went to India to work with an Ayurvedic guru. I’ve worked with healers from every continent on the globe.
And although I can say that the metaphors do help in terms of putting sets of symptoms into a context, I cannot say that I’ve derived one iota of benefit from all this omphalospection.
If not for the Biggess Doggess, I would certainly pack it in. It seems odd that I would stay alive and suffer for a wolfish beastie. Somehow I just can’t let her down. She has been through so much! A victim of trafficking, quite literally, used and thrown away. With love and care, she’s flourishing. I can’t bear the thought of her going through any more trauma. She totally freaks if I leave her sight. I’ve committed to staying alive as long as she lives, if I can.
We’ll just have to see what happens.