A Writer's Life Interrupted #crohns #crohnsdisease

Do you know how hard it is to write when you have this huge gaping hole in the middle of your emotional belly? It ain't easy and since my Crohn's blog is the place I usually examine my feelings about living with Crohn's that emptiness jumped out in front of my ongoing fight and refused to leave until I acknowledged it.  The grieving process must be recognized so I can move on.

When you're a kid, death is taken as a matter of course and since you're young it isn't something you often think about. If you do, you think, hey, it's years away. No need to deal with it yet. When you are raising kids, you are busy and when your grandmother dies it is the way of things. Now where is that baseball bat? you wonder before loading them into the SUV.

When your kids are grown and you are the one with grandkids and the generation in front of you begins to die off you know you're time will be sooner rather than later. You'd think having Crohn's would make me somewhat immune to the death process, people die every day from this horrid disease, but it doesn't. Nope, you grieve the same way you'd grieve for anyone and fear the specter of death with his nasty black habit and brilliant steel sickle.

Just yesterday,  I realized my grief is very similar to the emotions I felt when I learned I had Crohn's disease. There was that same sense of loss, of knowing your world will never be the same again, that pain would become a daily battle and sometimes I would win and sometimes Crohn's would. With death, once it wins, it's over.

I thought I would jot down some discoveries I've made these last two weeks. Because I have to tell you, losing my mother in law,  our rock, our road map to life  that she represented is devastating.

First things First

1. Everyone grieves differently. They really do. That's not a lie. I am a doer. I get into the middle of things and fix them and I try to do it fast so I can make time to grieve. Other people have to grieve first and that must be faced and dealt with before the doing. A doer can really piss off a griever if you're not careful. In regards to Crohn's I couldn't let myself grieve until I learned everything there was to learn about this blasted disease. In some cases, I knew more than the doctors. And that is a good thing.

2. Profound sadness. That's where I am now. Most of the hurry up and do stuff is done. Now I am just sad. Profoundly so. Every time I have a flare I become profoundly sad as well because the lie I'd been telling myself, the one about being perfectly healthy is just that, a lie. Profound sadness is an energy stealer in a big way. You just want to curl up into a ball and make the world go away. Except the world doesn't listen.

3. Anger. Because I am a doer and I must get to the doing so don't get in my way personality, I will be extremely pissed off if you try to stop me from doing what I perceive must be done. Just let me do and back away until I am ready to be done. Then we can talk and grieve together.

4. Fear. Oh, yeah. My old nemesis. I never know what I am going to wake up to so my day is usually started with a panic attack. Not always, but often enough to know how to deal with it. Just calm the breathing, do a complete body check, then get out of bed and get going. It's that easy or hard, I just get going. Grief is like that too. I just get going.

5. I am at peace with Crohn's. I don't like it and it pisses me off when there are things to be done. Like when you are stuck in a hospital for a week it is good to remember a few things:

        a. Bring extra clothes.
        b. Know where all bathrooms are.
        c. Bring Gas-X
        d. Bring your own food. By the way, did I tell you about the moldy apple juice that came out of the cafeteria?         Best not to think of such things. Trust me. It really was gross.
        e. Think Zen meditation.

Those are my tips for this week. Hang in, be strong, and hopefully next week the grief will be less enough to allow me to write about other things. If not, well that's the way this blog crumbles.

Blessings,

Louann