So, I’ve totally dropped the ball on keeping up with this blog. It’s been a year and a half since my last post about not wanting to take my meds. Perhaps it is apropos that that was my last post, since it is now a year and a half later, and in a few days I will be celebrating life one year meds free!

Meds free?! you say? But you have a chronic illness, that does’t go away….. That is what I thought until I completely changed my life. Now, what I’m about to say is NOT meant to be medical advice. I’m not trying to tell you to stop your meds. This  just happened to work for me, and I believe that it is possible for other people too… that being said, I’m going to get on with my story.

Let me start by explaining where I was health-wise in the summer of 2009: I was fat. I believe the AMA would even have called me obese.  I was taking a TON of meds (see my last post, linked above), my masto wasn’t under control (I had better days then before I was diagnosed and medicated, but certainly wasn’t living a chronic illness free life), I had acid reflux (better with the barrage of meds but still present), and my body hurt. All the time. Specifically, my lower back and left hip hurt all the time. So much so that walking down the street hurt my back, and I was incapable of falling asleep at night without taking some sort of NASAID (at least 3 200 mg pills if not 4. Some nights I took as many as 8 or 10).

The pain got to the point that I was desperate. I had moments when I could understand why people become drug addicts… anything to stop the pain. So I made an appointment at the pain clinic at the hospital. I got a MRI, x-rays etc. They decided the best course of action was to give me something similar to cortisone shots in my spine and hips. The story of that process is a whole other thing so I’ll leave it this: I got the shots. The pain went away. I went for a 5 mile hike, it was amazing. The shots were supposed to last for 3-6 months. They lasted for 5 weeks.

So, after 5 weeks, when the pain came back, I had a total melt down. I couldn’t go through getting the shots again, especially not to get them every 5 weeks for the rest of my life. And I couldn’t live with the pain anymore. At this point, I was staying with my Dad and Step-mom and she is a chiropractor and Feldenkrais practitioner. She is also a strong believer in alternative medicine, and actually hates western medicine. So we started talking about my alternative options.

The story of everything that has happened between that conversation and where I am now is for another day and probably many posts. But I will leave you with this: today I am meds free, I have NO masto symptoms, I only get acid reflux on a rare occasion and I know what causes it, I am a healthy weight (I never dieted) and I am mostly pain free.

The main things I attribute this miraculous change in circumstance to are: a complete change in lifestyle, a change of diet, and acupuncture. There have been many other alternative healings that have helped pave the way, but those are the main ones. I will explain more in near future posts. Promise

There I said it. I don’t want to take them. Not because of any side effects or anything like that. But just because I don’t want to. Every time I look down at my handful of pills (at night I swallow around 10 pills in a myriad of colors, shapes and sizes) I feel like throwing them at the wall. Because that isn’t my life. I’m not a pill taker. I’m not sick. I’m in my 20s. I’m healthy and happy and carefree.

Only. I’m not. Yes, I’m in my 20s. But I’m not healthy. And when I don’t take my meds I’m usually not that happy and definitely not carefree. And I do take pills. Lots of pills.

S and I have talked about this a lot over the past year of our friendship–how there is a psychological block or disconnect–that maybe, just maybe, this time we won’t need our meds. That today our bodies will remember they are young and virile. That if we ignore our symptoms, pretend they doesn’t exits, that they will cease to. Mind over matter. Right?

Unfortunately, hell hath no fury like a body deprived of it’s meds.

And so, as I sit here, my stomach roiling in acid, my bones feeling as if they are going to implode and my brain foggy like London, I tell myself that today I’ll remember to take my pills. Today I’ll pour the Gastrocrom into a glass of water and drink it all. And in a few days I’ll be feeling better.

That is if I don’t throw them at the wall first.

Hi,

M here. I just wanted to give you all a brief intro to this blog and what it is all about. S   and I are both in our twenties and we both have chronic illnesses, albeit different ones.   S has rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and I have indolent systemic mastocytosis (or masto for short). Check out the About page to learn more about each of us and all about our conditions.

S and I have been friends for a while. It wasn’t until recently that we discovered that we have this shared “issue.” And like sunlight breaking through the clouds (I love cliches), I suddenly had a friend who understood me–someone who got a part of me that no one else, not my parents, not even my best friend and roommate A, could possibly understand. Because, unless you have a chronic condition you can’t know what it is like. And unless you are twenty and have one, there is no way you can understand the physical and psychological pressure and changes it imposes on you.

Now, this isn’t going to be a woe is us blog. Quite the opposite. We decided to join forces and blog about our experiences of being in our twenties and having chronic conditions both as a way to document our lives and to reach out to other twenty-somethings (or teens, or thirty-somethings, or whomever). Both S and I are great advocates of social media and its power to transform the world we live in, and so we are embarking on a journey to do just that, to span boundaries of space and time, to use technology to capture and share our unique experiences, so that our stories can transcend our lives and touch other people.

We hope that other twenty-somethings with chronic conditions will find this blog and identify with what we are saying. We hope that they will reach out to us–that we will find community with each other. But if none of that happens, at the very least, we hope that writing this blog will help us deal, day-by-day, with the struggles of being twenty-something and having a chronic illness.

Photo Credit: Abel Baria