And one more thing

This weblog wouldn’t be complete without a little before and after. I don’t have any photos of me at my lowest weight (115lb / 52kg), but here are some from December ’08, when I was still around 123lb / 56kg.

Here I’m red-faced from a hot shower, but most of the time I’d get comments from people about how pale I looked. Low blood count, you see, due to slow, constant blood loss.

This second pic gives you a sense of how my increasingly skeletal frame filled out my clothes (poorly), how gaunt I was becoming, and how useless I was. I spent most of the holidays on a single couch filling out crosswords. Occasionally I had to go up and down the stairs, which would wind me immediately.

Here, by contrast, are some shots from July ’09, a little over 3 months with Sammy Stoma and roughly 145lb / 66kg.

Yes, my shorts are pulled a bit high to cover Sammy’s ostomy bag. This is the best I’ve got in terms of shirtless self-portraits, but hopefully it’s enough to show the return of my upper-body muscles. If not, suffice it to say that the Maui winds would have blown me down the coast if I’d tried to take the outrigger canoe out earlier this year.

Update 9/25/09: So many activities are completely off-limits when the average time from urgency to accident is 2 minutes or less. I was reminded of this yesterday when a friend joined me for several hours at the climbing gym. I’d take a stoma over being home-bound any day…and do!

Signing out

It used to be incomprehensible to me how life could possibly be better with a seemingly important organ completely removed. Had I not been so close to dying, would I have ever “given in” to the doctors?

Here’s the crazy thing. I now have more energy and strength than I’ve had for most of my 12 years with UC.*

For example, one of the things that I believe hastened my decline in ’07/’08 was an addiction to energy drinks. I’d be exhausted every afternoon, so in order to get through the day, I’d give myself a large-can dose of taurine, ginseng, caffeine, and vitamin B. Begin the feedback loop: dehydration and hormone imbalance -> more tired -> energy drink -> dehydration and hormone imbalance….

Before that, things weren’t much better. I’d always assumed that my afternoon slumps and my slight brain fuzziness were symptoms of my bad sleep habits. Now I think that my colon was sapping me of energy regardless of whether or not I was in remission.

Proof? OK…

1. I’ve been regularly operating on 6 hours or less sleep, yet my energy has been consistently up.
2. While previous attempts at consistent exercise tended to leave me feeling better briefly, but tired overall, I now do a full 30-60 minutes 1-2 times per week and feel great.
3. Activities that used to cause me back pain somehow don’t any more.
4. Though I hid it and denied it, I used to have long bouts of depression. I’ve been out of work for so long now that I should still be depressed, but instead I’m taking on several projects at once while still applying for several jobs a week. (Gotta love the economy!)

Anyway, I don’t expect to post here for awhile longer. I’ve got a small bit of rectum left for potential J-pouch surgery, so I still output a teaspoon or two of mucus and/or blood 3-4 times a day. That’s so minor compared with everything I’d been through, that there’s no way I’m going to be taking time to post about it any further. I’m eating whatever I want, taking 0-3 tablets of loperamide, and strong enough to hike, canoe, and throw my 4-year-old into the air despite the growth spurt.

As I understand it, autoimmune diseases drain the body of energy because it keeps the immune system going at full tilt. My choice was to give up the ability to reabsorb water at the tail end of digestion or the ability to stay alive. Not that complicated. But my earlier choice, and the one that thousands of others face, is between draining huge amounts of vital energy through their colons and getting the damn things removed. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that UC sufferers should have colectomies, but I can at least say with confidence that it’s a waste of life to wait as long as I did once the meds and diets and voodoo stop working.

So goodbye, UC, it’s been, well, a pain in the ass. And goodbye colon. It was nice while you functioned, but can’t say that I’ll miss you.