#that they cured ibs and chronic pain when nothing else did

[orphancookie69]

Health Around The World: Western vs Chinese

So, I don’t have the greatest relationship with doctors even in the western world as an American having grown up in USA. But my partner is from the Eastern side of the world. Normally I go to doctors, and find disappointment in the lack of natural solutions, and often answers. Which I still find shocking given how much science and technology we have these days. But, I recently went to a Chinese Doctor and man...that was an interesting comparative experience. 

Western Medicine: 

So anyone following my blog knows that I have some chronic conditions, which I have seen some doctors about and have adjusted my lifestyle for-compensating with drugs. But while dealing with infertility, I experienced abdominal/pelvic pain. I checked the pelvis out with an ultrasound, nothing there. Then I went to a Family Doctor and ordered a CT Scan. Did the CT Scan, and their guess is possible IBS, so they want me to adjust diet and see if I feel better. 

Don’t get me wrong, I love my doctors these days. But the confines of western medicine limit them greatly. I am down to try a new diet, it is not the first time a doctor has told me what to eat. But it would be nice to not play a guessing game-when by all accounts I am “doing it right” by going to the trusted professional. Look out for a future blog post regarding that. 

Eastern Medicine: 

So, running errands with my partners family-we end up in a chinese herb shop with an “in house” chinese doctor. He did a reading on my partner, updated his prescription of herbal tea and then did me. He spoke Cantonese, so my Mandarin speaking family translated to English to me. 

I had a visit with a chinese doctor, Dr Tan at Wing Hip Fung in Monterey Park. Diagnosis: The doctor looked at my pulse on both hands and visually at my tongue. He said to eat less sweets, work out more, eat better, drink less cold drinks. I ran cold. My kidney is weak and leads to migraine and fertility issues. He picked up on the too much fluid in me. Also the dizziness from my chronic migraines. Also my blocked tubes, if I want to carry a kid I need to do a couple of months of meds. I was told to relax and be happy. I was given stuff to make a soup to eat after the start of my next cycle. I have been dealing with the pelvic/stomach issue with my family doctor and that has yet to discover a cause or cure. My pulse and tongue were read, and I was given a prescription for a soup base. I was seen by the doctor, my prescription was filled at the counter with traditional weight and my price determined with an abacus.

First of all, this guy did not know me from adam. And yet, nothing was wrong. I did not know about the kidneys, but in my head-I thought...shouldn’t the CT Scan or any other test caught that? While I am waiting on the timing to do the soup, I started drinking a Kidney Tea. While I do plan on trying the new diet per the western doctor, they both had something to say about diet. I don’t eat that bad, I do have a sweet tooth. But maybe keto isn’t best for my system, and how can my system be good to me if I am not giving it the right stuff? 

Time will tell what works, and what doesn’t. Does the new diet make me feel better? Do I try and carry a kid again and it works? Do I have less symptoms from my chronic migraines on the day to day? Also, I share this to open up anyone elses mind to a secondary opinion from other parts of the world-and yet I wonder if there are bilingual chinese herbal doctors out there...Would you go see one if there was? 

[chronicillnesssucks]

My colonoscopy went fine, and unfortunately, everything looked perfect. When you’re chronically ill, the way you think sometimes is so strange. Of course I’m grateful that nothing is wrong with my intestines, I would never WANT IBD, but normal test results are sometimes just disappointed, and I’m sure you can all understand that. This means that I’m stuck with “just” a diagnosis of IBS. I know that I’ve had IBS for years, and I can tell that it’s slowly gotten worse over the past two or three years, and it’s also gotten so much worse after my appendix surgery and having c. diff. But even with all of that, these past two flares were like nothing I’ve ever had before in my life, and they were just damn brutal. It really feels like something has changed, and something is different. Not just IBS that’s gotten worse, it’s a whole new feeling and type of pain and symptoms, so I’m honestly really shocked that my intestines are completely normal looking. This means that although I’ve learned to handle and cope with more mild to moderate days (most of the time), if I ever have a month long, debilitating flare up again like the last two, I can’t do anything about it, I just have to deal with it. They hit out of nowhere, there wasn’t a food or activity or anything that triggered both of them, it was completely random. So it’s not like there’s something specific I can avoid, and my diet is already limited and pretty much what they tell someone with IBS to avoid anyways. During my last severe flare they gave me Bentyl, which did nothing, and told me to take more fiber, which I can’t because it gives me terrible pain because of the gastroparesis. And since IBS is just one of those ‘treat the symptoms, not cure the illness’ things, there’s not much else to do. Just so frustrating, and scary. Those horrible flares both hit me out of nowhere and literally stole a month of my life where I could barely stay awake or even sit up in bed when I wasn’t in the bathroom. I don’t want that to happen again with no options to help besides just wait for it to get better, and I was hoping that if it was IBD, there could at least be some more treatment options I could try. 

[kirinhealthprogressjournal]

I’m learning I used to have endometriosis before I got pregnant. Painful intercourse, excruciating unmanageable period cramps, and when I did get pregnant, in the first trimester, my body literally shed all the overgrowth and tissue and blood and bad stuff in my uterus and I thought for sure I had a miscarriage, but my doctor said everything was fine, and she seemed perplexed by what had happened to me, and said something about a change-over from where the baby receives nutrients, and the excess from before all comes out.  But she only offered that as a suggestion.  She wasn’t sure.  She just reassured me, it /can/ be normal, and she had seen it before.

Apparently, I also have PCOS.  Which I didn’t even know was a different thing from endometriosis.  I had the weight gain, the terrible acne, thinning hair, and a chronic normal-looking discharge, basically all day, every day. I was able to cure the acne only in my mid 20s with a supplement called Herpanacine, but I always struggled with my weight.

I’m not sure, but I’m going to guess these things are linked to what I now know is already a problem for me, which is that my immune system is attacking my body.  It explains the psoriasis I’ve had since I was eight.  It explains the hypothyroidism.  It explains the weird rash I broke out in all over my torso a few years ago when the doctor said my immune system was attacking my lungs, and they didn’t know what causes it.

It explains the IBS, that I was managing by taking enzymes to help digest food, and the IBS explains the anemia.

Part of me is so angry.

I look at pictures of myself when I was a teenager.  My face is visibly swollen.  My eyes are puffy and swollen.  I was always tired and complaining of feeling sick, especially in the mornings.  My ankles were swollen, my hands and feet would hurt in the mornings when I would walk or open things.  My eyebrows were all but gone.  

I DONT LOOK RIGHT.

There was OBVIOUSLY something MEDICALLY wrong with me!

But my mother was incapable of empathizing with other human beings, and always made me feel that my LIFE was an inconvenience, because her marriage was strained, (because she’s a sociopath). They didn’t /want/ to get married to each other.  They didn’t actually /want/ me.  They got married and pregnant because that was what was expected of them.

Neither of them were happy together, and even less happy trying to raise a child and provide for a family.

When my mom thought she lost me when she was pregnant, she shrugged it off and went and rode roller coasters and did stuff you’re not supposed to do when you’re pregnant, without even going to the doctor.  She was shocked when he asked if she wanted to hear the heartbeat.

Nobody cared enough to notice there was something wrong, and that I needed medical attention.

Not even when my period cramps were so excruciating they left me writhing on the floor until I threw up from the pain, and then passed out from exhaustion, sweating and pale and clammy.

Nobody cared.  They told me it was normal.  They told me everybody has them, and to just deal with it.

They didn’t believe me when I said I felt sick and told me I just didn’t want to go to school.

And I couldn’t argue that, because I hated school.  I couldn’t concentrate.  I was picked on chronically for being overweight and having bad acne ad not being allowed to wear makeup to cover it up.  For not wearing expensive clothes and having my nails and hair professionally done.  I went to a very wealthy public school.  My dad made good money.  But my mother acted as if we were living in the great depression and bemoaned buying me normal things like a bar of soap, claiming she “JUST bought me some” even if it was months ago.

My mother was not right in the head. My father liked to stay out of her way.

I never felt close to him until I was fourteen, and they were worried I would kill myself and I begged them, in tears, to take me to a psychiatrist, just so I could /talk/ to someone. And the therapist told me she didn’t see any reason for me to visit with her.  So I lied.  I started talking about knives and said I hid one in my room and that I liked cutting things with it. And then she told my parents she had a few concerns and she thought I would benefit from coming to see her.

I had no idea I had a slew of medical and psychological conditions.  And whenever I read about one I identified with, people made fun of me. “Oh, yeah, I bet you diagnose yourself with everything.“  And  “Yeah, you and everybody else.“

Fuck you.

Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.

Yeah, life is hard.  Yeah, people struggle with different things.  Yeah, nobody likes to get up in the morning and go to work, or to school, or whatever, but they do it.

Nobody wants to admit somebody might have it worse.  Especially, when they look ‘normal’.  - (Because I wasn’t crippled, or permanently disfigured, or throwing up every day.)  

My symptoms were all things people could easily shove aside because they didn’t want to deal with it.  They told me it wasn’t happening, because they didn’t want it to be their problem.

So I fucking struggles with my immune system trying to kill me, my entire life, and on top of that, a family who didn’t give a shit about it, trying to force me to function ‘normally’, because if I didn’t, it might indicate that they were less than perfect, and my mom is secretly a fucking sociopath, who believes peoples’ feelings are nothing but factors in the environment that she can either be nice about, or twist and manipulate to her own whims.  She’s incapable of empathy, or of being able to perceive a viewpoint that’s not her own.

When she argues with you, she’s not trying to understand where you’re coming from.  She’s not capable of it.  She’ll seem confused, and just keep arguing her own point until she fucking wears you out or down, or whatever it takes until you just shut up and do what she wants.

There is no ‘you’.  There’s only the way she /wants/ things to be.  And that’s being kind.  I still won’t talk about some of the things she put me through. -some of which I only recently recovered in my memory.

I always thought ‘repressed memories’ were things you couldn’t recall happening at all.  I didn’t realize they were events that your brain ‘remembers’.  I always knew this thing, on a very basic level, did happen to me.  I even convinced myself it was normal, and never opened it up any deeper than ‘this vaguely happened to me a long time ago, and I don’t think about it in detail.’

And then I watched a youtube video of a woman talking about an unrelated experience, that reminded me of the depth of what happened.  and 

HOLY HELL.

Fucking hell.

It all came back.  It all made sense.

No fucking wonder I have issues.  No fucking wonder I have triggers.  No fucking wonder I don’t trust people.

And that bitch.  That woman that calls herself my mother.  She blew off my concerns, and fucking stood there and let it happen to me.

And then she spent the rest of my life, dismissing my medical problems so she wouldn’t have to deal with them.  Dismissing my emotional scarring, and trying to manipulate me into being ‘normal’.  Into being like my sister, who had more energy than she knew what to do with.  Who always got good grades.  Who had no problem making friends.

And when I was 12, and just starting to dawn on the fact that my mother was maybe not everything she should be, my younger, naive sister, who had life at her fingertips and never ran into anything she couldn’t have or do, she told me my problems with my mom might be /my/ fault.

And I don’t blame her for giving me that pain, because she was very young, and she had no way of knowing what I was going through.

But it still hurt like hell, and I was so lonely I often asked God if he could just take me away.  Because I believed that killing myself would only land me in Hell, because it would be committing a murder, of myself.

And people tell me, Grow up.  Be your own woman.  You don’t need a ‘man’ to save you.

And they’re right. They’re right.

I didn’t need a man.  I just needed someone who could love me, and believe in me, and be patient with me, while I sort through all the bullshit of my past and try to take care of myself and become a healthier, stronger person, and overcome everything that happened to me, and maybe one day, I’ll be healthy enough to function like ‘normal people’.

I needed someone, anyone, who could help me even /get/ to a place, where I could start to save /myself/.  Where all my efforts could actually start to make a difference.

His gender had nothing to do with that. Everyone needs some support.  Everyone needs love.  Everyone needs friends who believe in them, and help them when they can’t function like everyone else does

BECAUSE THEY HAVE A FUCKING MEDICAL CONDITION.

I read an article recently that said people with chronic fatigue from autoimmune disease is like being awake for THREE DAYS STRAIGHT, and then being expected to function like a normal person.

and I’ve lived my WHOLE FUCKING LIFE like this!!  While the people who were supposed to love me and care about me, told me I was being lazy and fat and ugly and why can’t I just get over it and do what’s expected of me. I’M SO ANGRY.

....

Why did this happen to me?