Broken

I blinked back the tears as I sat waiting at the red-light at the intersection of Billingsley and Randolph Roads and tried to allow everything the doctor had just said to me to really sink in. I replayed him in my mind’s eye as he flipped through my medical chart. The routine physical I had in February showed that even then, I was pretty sick—deficient in most vitamins. His finger slid across the yellow paper landing on every circled spot-- life-force that disease had apparently been stealing from me.  I could only stare down in silence as my eyes followed the zigzag pattern that lead straight to my diagnosis of being undeniably broken.

The look in my Gastroenterologist doctor’s eyes wasn’t scary on purpose--it was honest--and the truth of the matter was, that things were not good. He sent my primary care doctor a note to tell her that he had given me a new diagnosis.  I frowned down at the newly inked red circle on my chart that enclosed the words “Crohns Disease”.

I had my own suspicions, I did some symptom-based research but nothing prepared me for the enormity of the diagnosis and as the news of my particular dire health continued to come, it grew, dwarfing me in the corner of the already too-small and cold gray examination room.

He said that I needed to see a surgeon immediately to address some other complications. Fear struck my heart—a surgeon?  I tried to listen to what he was saying but my inner voice stole the show; the worst is over, right? I am better, I can walk again. I drove myself to my appointment today.

He sensed my disbelief. “You are very sick.”

My mind rose in conflict with the information that he was telling me, presenting me with pictures of myself doing intense workouts, jumping-jacks with weights, balanced on one leg in my favorite yoga pose, and hiking my favorite strenuous trail in the mountains.

No!  My mind refused. Wellness was my thing, my identity, the way I lived in the world and I wasn’t about to give it up.

His words continued to come anyway, like rocks being pelted at my glass house…Multiple ulcers…no workouts for at least six months…no hiking, no more raw veggies…medications…no cure…forever...My eyes stared unseeingly at the doctor as I dodged the shards of glass crumbling down around me, the remnants of who I thought I was and the life I had lived up until today---all gone, all broken.

He told me that it wasn’t my fault, that I didn’t do anything wrong to cause this disease. Maybe he thought that somehow this information would soften the, your-life-as-you-KNEW-it-is-over blow.

 It didn’t.

I mumbled instead, “I can’t get sick, I can’t have surgery, I have to find a new apartment in a couple of weeks, I have to move, I have to get back to work….”

He said I wasn’t listening to him and he was right. I kept trying to talk myself out of it, talk him into spinning answers that I could live with. He’s no fool, he knew what I was doing---denial. He looked me straight in the eye again and told me that I had a non-curable disease and he repeated it until he was sure that I comprehended what that really meant.

And what that really meant was that there was no going back to ‘before’. My health would change from day to day or even sometimes hour to hour. No amount of bootcamp, yoga or healing foods were going to chase Crohns away or even guarantee a remission.

“You’re going to have to face this.” He stared at me hard, unwilling to let me leave the cold gray room or say another word until I accepted it.

He had obviously seen my kind before; the person that just thought they needed more exercise, the person that avoided medications at all costs, the person who powered their body with the willpower of the mind, the person who waited until they were so broken that they could hardly walk before asking for help.

As I continued my drive home, I recalled the last few weeks of my life before I came to be in his care. My “condition” had deteriorated very quickly. I was in immense pain, the kind that caused an adrenaline rush followed by the threat of a blackout. I couldn’t walk, drive, cook, or even get up to open the door. I sat in a valium induced haze on a heating pad sleeping off and on and barely eating for two whole weeks but even knowing all of that, I still sat in a doctor’s office today denying that I was really, really sick, that I was really, really, broken.

Tears started to burn my eyes as more of the denial lifted and yet another realization begun to sink in, I was only able to walk today because I had been taking ten anti-inflammatory pills, two steroid pills and three antibiotic pills a day since my colonoscopy only four days earlier.

The light at the intersection turned green and I could hardly believe that I made it through without killing someone.

Obviously the meds he gave me before the actual diagnosis were helping but it was almost as if I had erased the last three weeks from my mind as being "real”. Despite hating pills, I hadn’t read-up on the side-effects from the meds but was choking them back three times a day—denial.  I didn’t want to know what these chemicals were doing to my body, I just wanted to get better as fast as I could, to be normal again, to exercise, to stalk food trucks, to once again enjoy my beloved broccoli and cauliflower with spicy Asian sauce at lunch time.

I was treating myself like I had an injury; already making plans to go back to work as soon as possible and designing a workout regimen to get myself back to health. But he was telling me that I wasn’t injured, I was broken.

Eventually, and begrudgingly, I let the truth reflected in his firm eyes enter into my hard head. It was only then, when he saw the last of my denial crumbling, that he continued.

He spent the last part of my appointment going over the startlingly dangerous side-effects of the medications and the different stages of meds used for Crohns—I was started in stage two because I was too severe for stage one meds to work.

I had waited too long to seek help.

I cried the rest of the way home barely giving a thought to the curious stares of the people in the cars around me all stuck in five o’clock traffic on a Tuesday evening.

I sat in the car wondering, where did my life go? In the space of an hour I had suddenly become two people—the health-nut person that I still thought that I was and the sick Crohns-person that the doctor said that I was. How was I going to put these two people together?

Medications, surgeries, hospital stays, regular GI doctor visits, higher risk of cancer, random bouts of pain….never again making a food choice without thinking, will this be a trigger, will this land me in the hospital again?

My house was empty when I walked in the door. The friend who had nursed me over the last two weeks had left because we thought that I was better. I suddenly became more aware of my body and of the great betrayal that my mind had done it. I had thought it was nothing too serious. A year of symptoms, piling on top of each other, my mind finding new reasons to explain them away.

I eased my foreign-feeling body slowly down onto the softest spot of the couch—newly aware of the ulcers and other suspected medical complications of forming abscesses and fistulas. I touched my abdomen and compassion washed over me for what my body had been though over the last three weeks. I thought of all the tests, the scans, the scopes, the bleeding, the starvation, the medicines and worst of all, my relentless pushing.  I cringed.

Old habits die hard and it wasn’t long before my amazingly stubborn mind wanted to take over the situation, wrench the reins from my emotionally devastated-self in an effort to salvage something of the self I knew. It wanted to go into warrior-mode, grab the computer, research, research, research, and find a new way with no meds, some weird ancient herbal treatment, or some secret code out there in the universe to unlock this prison of sickness that I had been confined to.

I sat up suddenly, wiped the tears from my eyes and opened up Google but my fingers just hovered. I started to fight with myself. My stubborn mind had already pushed my fragile body so far and here I was already pushing again. I shoved the computer away, angry at myself and lay back down on the couch. Grief met me there. It wrapped around me like a blanket, holding tightly to me until I could resist no more. I let the idea of who I was and where I thought I was going in my life dissolve; the fitness buff, the mostly raw veggie diet lifestyle, the no meds allowed policy, the idea that my body, like my mind, had no limits. I let it all go, released my grip and let it fall like sand through my fingers.

 I am sick. I am broken.

I felt my mind begin to soften towards my body, like a mother to an ailing baby.

I wrapped my arms around myself, until the waves of sadness and grief finally faded to acceptance and then I did something that I had resisted my whole life---I rested.

Originally written August 16th, 2012