I'm A Healthy Person After All

In the annals of weird, medical phenomena you will find a page with my name on it. Here is a person who eats right, takes care of herself (although she could exercise a bit more) and yet she has a serious -- sometimes debilitating -- pain in her side that has been there for years and refuses to go away. This pain has left a dogging question in my mind. And at long last the answer to my question has emerged. I have to say that I like my primary care physician and my gastroenterologist very much. They're great people and without them I would still be wondering if I'm dying or something.

The good news is, I do not have an ulcer, I am perfectly healthy. I have a weird colon. Yup, that's it. I'm sure I've mentioned the fact before that I am a very small person. I never thought that being small could be a bad thing -- aside from the fact that if I accidentally skip a meal I become very weak. But there is one other problem with being this small. My colon has to make some rather sharp turns in order to fit itself inside of my abdomen. Thus, my food has a difficult time making it from one end to the other. In effect, my colon spasms to get the food through and that causes me a lot of pain. I had a colonoscopy the other day and they showed me the photos of my weird colon. Yeah, it's weird. I've seen photos from those procedures before and they didn't look quite like mine. There were some very sharp corners and some twisted spots. It was weird all right. Now I know why no one has ever been able to find anything wrong with me before.

The bad news is the chronic pain. The one thing I feared about all this was that I would be in pain for the rest of my life. I wanted something to be done to get rid of the pain completely. I wanted to live my life without that. But on this crazy journey of medical tests and all kinds of crap (sometimes literally, tmi) I have come to realize one thing. I don't care if I always have this pain, I care if I always have this pain and do not know why I have it. In the knowing lies the answer. I can make things easier on myself and I intend to do just that by eating even more right and exercising more.

In the end I am reminded once again of my own mortality. Physical weakness is part of how God reminds us that we need Him. Perhaps I can count all this as some sort of blessing even on the days when it is impossible to think like that.

Also, if any of you ever have to have a colonoscopy, let me tell you the two days before it are the worst thing imaginable. No, they're even worse than that. You have to "cleanse" your colon on those days. Just take the worst thing you can possibly imagine and multiply it by 27, that's how bad it is. I'm really hoping I will only have to endure that once in my life.