Tag Archives: nausea

Hit a Wall on Day 9

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It happened…I guess I knew it would.
I woke up at 2:50a feeling terribly. After some unpleasant time in the bathroom, I was able to head back to bed for a bit. Then, I woke again at 3:45a and had to go back to the bathroom.  It felt like food poisoning, where there’s a demon in your belly and you know it needs to come out but can’t figure out if it’s going up or down…or both.  What a horrible way to spend a Saturday night.

Friday night while eating a bowl of strawberries and pineapple, I got a sudden soreness in the back of my mouth.  Fearing I was having an allergic reaction (even though I’ve eaten both foods many times before), I was quick to put down the fork and grab some Benadryl.  The possibility of an allergic reaction that close to my throat was very frightening.  But the Benedryl didn’t make anything better and the sore, red spots were still there when I woke up on Saturday and again on Sunday.  After the rough night Saturday, the soreness in my mouth were enough to make me go to the doctor. I always google my symptoms to try to self-diagnose and the only pictures that looked like what I had in my mouth were shown as mouth cancer.  So off to urgent care I ran!  My over-reacting, hypochondriac thinking was wrong (as it usually is); the doctor’s diagnosis: canker sores.  I’ve never had one in my life and the doc said they don’t necessarily know why they occur.  Canker sores, according to him, aren’t serious but can be annoying and painful…indeed they are!  A couple treatment prescriptions later and I was on my way home.

The rest of my Sunday (my last day of Spring Break, mind you) was not spent as I had originally anticipated.  The whole reason I started this eating program was to get healthy again, to reboot my body in a way.  But here I was feeling awful.  The nausea was so intense throughout the day on Sunday and I barely ate a thing.  I made a little bit of chicken-carrot-kale soup in the morning but it hurt to eat.  At lunch, I had a small portion of the previous night’s dinner and dinner…I wanted nothing.  I cooked up another batch of the Sausage & Potato soup around dinnertime, as I had planned to use that for breakfasts this week.  The smell of the meat and then the coconut milk was rough on my senses.  That soup is delicious but I felt so uncomfortable during the whole cooking process due to the nausea.  I didn’t know if the nausea (and the digestive issues during the previous night) were due to the diet or that I was returning to work the next day.  So many times on Sunday, I was ready to throw in the towel on this eating plan.  Usually when I’m not feeling well, tea and toast are my go-to’s…tea alone wasn’t working for me. I wanted Saltines and ginger ale.  It was almost easier to eat nothing than W30 foods.  Dinner ended up being just a small cup of organic, unsweetened apple sauce.

Monday (Day 10) saw me back at school.  My stomach was a little uneasy in the morning, as it has been so often lately.  I took two Imodium tablets and hit the road.  When I got to school, I took my anti-nausea pill, hoping I was covering myself at both ends so that I would make it through the day.  The canker sore is still there on the right, making talking and eating a challenge.  I didn’t want anything for breakfast even though I was hungry.  I ate a banana, since I had to put something in my stomach to take the anxiety medication, and made myself a cup of green mint tea.  A colleague noted a change in my appearance: she said I wasn’t looking well.  So my appearance was matching how I was feeling; I guess that’s something…

I’ve been reading a lot of comments from people who didn’t complete the Whole 30 and how they felt better going off the program.  It was interesting to read those after reading so many positive ones about the plan.  So far for Day 10, I’ve stuck it out.  I got through a school day eating these foods. I know I need to eat more, that I really did not have enough food today.  Out of fear of food not sitting well along with the pain of eating due to the mouth sore, my goal was simply get through today whatever it took.  I did…now I need to figure out how to eat healthily so that I’m not feeling so hungry and lethargic while being confident that my digestive system will respond in kind.  April 30 seems so far away…

The April experiment

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It’s been a rough 2017 so far.  Out of nowhere, my phantom nausea had returned mid-January and has been popping up all over the place ever since.  A handful of doctor visits and maxing out all my sick leave has found me here: 5 days until spring break and convinced it’s time to “fix” myself.

Apparently my ailment is functional – there’s nothing seriously wrong but things aren’t working as they should be.  The catchall reason why: stress.  I know that I haven’t been good about making my health a priority and I even see it now in the midst of whatever this is. After being home for two weeks, I went to work and had a few days where I felt wonderful. I thought I was over the hump…until it came roaring back BIG time. I got lazy with the working out and diets; you know, the part where I take care of myself. I had stopped, and my body was not happy.  So I did some reading-research and came up with a plan.

Whole 30 for April

April is 30 days long, which is perfect! Spring Break starts on April 1, also perfect. I’m not going to go into what the Whole 30 plan is; if you don’t know or never heard of it, google it. I had purchased the It Starts with Food book a couple years ago but never finished reading it (a bad habit of mine…)  I’m now in the midst of it and am hopeful that this is what my body needs right now.  My brain could use the challenge of sticking with restricted food choices. My body needs the whole foods.  It all needs a break from excess sugar.  I love sweets but I’m tired of feeling like crap. If all it’s going to take is 30 days to heal this ol’ bag of bones, how dumb would I be to not try it?

Sweat it out

So that’s the food part.  I’m also going to go to hot yoga three times a week because it was starting to work and then I got lazy.  I felt stronger. I could stretch deeper. I had gone down a pound and kept it off for over a week instead of the daily fluctuations that kept happening.  If my schedule allows, I may try to go four or five times. It’s a great way to transition from my work day to me-time at home.  If I don’t go to yoga, the plan is to take a long walk.  Time in nature has been missing from my life lately. It’s all about whatever it takes to keep stress at manageable levels.

Setting up the experiment

This week, I’m shifting my diet towards the Whole 30 but the rules aren’t absolute for this week.  I did bake an egg dish for my weekday breakfasts this week to heat-and-eat when I get to work.  Eating a protein-rich breakfast is a part of the program but since I feel nauseated every morning, I can’t cook at home. I’ve been nauseous most mornings when I get to work so eating is going to be a challenge but we’ll see how it goes this week. I’m also due for my period and tend to feel achy the first twenty-four hours so tomorrow (Monday) should be tons of fun…

I’m really hopeful that I reap great rewards from this program like I’ve read others have experienced. I want to get off the couch and have energy and feel normal, feel human more often than not.  It’s been a really rough couple of months and I need something to change.

 

What can I do

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I sit here, dressed for work. I’m looking kind of cute today in my beige button down, black flare skirt, black leggings, and blue Tieks, hair pulled back into a high ponytail. It says a lot that I feel cute without a stitch of makeup on.  That’s an odd saying, isn’t it? “A stitch of makeup”…doesn’t really make any sense when you think about it.  Anyway… I was all dressed and ready to go.  But yet, I’m still sitting here.  I can’t leave my home.  I’m afraid to venture too far from my bathroom.

Thankfully, the night passed without disruption.  The morning started out okay. I tried to not think ahead because it’s the thinking that starts the spiral. But since it seems to consistently strike around 6:30a, I wondered if I could get out the door fifteen minutes before then, maybe I could ward it off. Or maybe I would already be at work when the worst of it hits. Or maybe, dare I hope too big, if I just got out the door, this would be the morning that it wouldn’t be an issue at all.  I was ready to go around 6:21a. I looked at the clock to note the time when it began. It started small, in the middle of my chest. Then it spread outward.  It was time to leave for work and the nausea was setting in.  Do I stay or do I go?  The battle had begun.

I stayed home. Again.  The thought of being an adult who just wanted to curl up in a ball on the tiled floor of our school’s staff bathroom seemed unsettling. It’s hard to put myself in a potential situation like being responsible for a classroom full of children and having an urgency to use the bathroom but the bathroom is a 3 minute walk away and you can’t leave the children unattended.  I think many jobs, you could go in and see how it goes but if you’re not feeling better then you leave and go home. But I teach.  It’s hard to find someone in the middle of the day to take over the room. It’s hard to make the call to the office for coverage when you can’t wait those few minutes for that person to arrive without fear of embarrassingly having a toileting accident.  And yet this is where I’m at.  The doctor says it sounds like IBS (irritable bowel syndrome) but the horrible nausea makes me think it may be functional dyspepsia (I read about that yesterday).  Whichever it may be, it is not something you can easily manage while being a classroom teacher. I’ve tried googling for the stories of other teachers and how they manage.  Some lucky ducks have a bathroom nearby and students they could leave for a couple minutes. Not me.  My sick time is dwindling and I don’t know how to fix this…which is adding more stress to my body and probably making matters worse.  I don’t know what to do…