NAVIGATING PERSONAL STRUGGLES AFTER GASTRIC BYPASS: A JOURNEY OF HEALING AND RESILIENCE
July has been hard. Actually the last few months have been a very big challenge. I am a bit of a believer in sharing my scars, not my wounds. Sometimes, I wonder if that is a left over from the toxic culture that I grew up, and spent my 20'ies and 30'ies somewhat involved in. If I was struggling back in those days, the advice was to only "talk up" which meant - "tell no one what you are really going through - just the leaders" and I guess that kept me fairly silent, and to a large degree, feeling stuck in the misery that I was feeling. I know it sounds crazy, and why would anyone do that, but I just had not grown enough in myself to question those values at the time. The self reflection that was required to force change in that area was deep and profoundly life changing. I obviously do not have those same values these days, but when I am going through things, my first instinct is still to hunker down, shut myself off, and distance myself from people. It makes me feel very lonely. This blog has been sitting in my drafts for 2 weeks now!! So I do apologise for not writing but please know that a story has been brewing.
At 6 years post gastric bypass it is easy to feel like you have probably seen all that you will see in terms of issues that could pertain to your weight loss surgery. It is also normal to have long stretches of time where the only reminder of what you have had done on the inside of you is that daily vitamin and your smaller portion sizes. But over these past few months things have roared back to life in a way that has been particularly unexpected. Back in March I found myself in the hospital. I was doing my very best to ignore the fact that my body had been struggling, I had felt unwell for about a week and I had commenced with terrible and really uncontrollable toilet times. I know this is not a great topic, but I have not been one to gloss over my story and I don't intend to start now. What started on a Wednesday, reached breaking point on a Saturday morning.
No one was home that could drive me anywhere and I was feeling so unwell that I walked to the hospital, because I didn't have access to a car that morning. (it isn't a very long walk) I was quickly taken through into a bed in emergency and bloods were done. Those bloods came back and they were terribly out of whack. I mean, to be fair, the fact that I had been shitting up to 30 times a day, for 3 days, was probably a bit of an indicator that I wasn't okay! Anyway, the assumption was made that I had some kind of gastro bug, and the hospital went with that for a couple of days. However, there was no improvement at all in my condition and it became obvious that it wasn't that at all. The gastroenterologist team that took over my care were incredible, eventually called in my surgeon, and gave me a diagnosis of Bile Acid Malabsorption. I have since had an additional diagnosis and to be honest it has exhausted me.
I have tried to find the words to talk about them, but if and when I do I am usually inundated with questions in my inboxes and as I don't have answers for myself, let alone for others, there is a repetition of my own helplessness that I have found myself reliving! So once again I find myself sitting in silence and I hate it. That, coupled with other situations, literally brought me to my knees last week. It is not often that I get to a place of truly being depressed but I did reach that point a couple of weeks ago. I felt my optimism, drowning in a sea of sadness.
When running social media groups like I do, there is always going to be what everyone thinks that they know about me, what I make public, what I am happy to talk about with you guys and then the bits that I just keep to myself. You, the readers of this blog have been my listening ear when I send things out into the void and I am so profoundly grateful for you. There have been times when your encouragement and kindness to me as made such a difference and I guess just knowing that when I find all of the other mediums of social interaction online, that I can come here, and hopefully untangle my heart in a verbal word dump - well it helps me. At the moment there are things pressing on me that I cannot share because it is not my story to tell but I feel like, because of the nature of the story, that I am dancing through a maze that I am unable to escape from, blindfolded. I know that isn't really the case, but my heart has rarely felt as broken in all of my life as it has felt in the past two weeks. So I do apologise for not writing more - it is hard to know what to say, except thank you for being here.
