Being Hard on Sickness
My wife was reading a post that I was writing today. She said it was good, it was me. So I asked, “what does that mean?” “What is me?” She said, “you are hard, you know what it takes to do what you have done with your Crohn’s.” Then she went on to say “you need to tell people how you got where you are now, you should write a post about that, about being hard.”
So here it is:
I was not this person writing to you now, I was a person who had learning disabilities, came from a dysfunctional family, and also had drug and alcohol problems. And, I had Crohn’s Colitis and was told that I needed to get a colostomy bag. I had to get tough.
I became a drill sergeant to myself. I was a person who had all these big ideas but no guts to go after them. Knowing that, I was afraid if I did not go full out to turn things around I would quit, so I started working towards my health first, with no room for excuses. I quit drinking and smoking cold turkey. I figured all I had to do was not put any of that stuff in my mouth and get past one day at a time and my body would stop needing it. I did have some set backs, but when that happened I would start again and eventually it worked and I eliminated smoking and drinking completely.
I started reading self help books like Breaking Free of the Co-dependency Trap by Barry and Janae Weinhold, Ph.D.s, and health books like Anatomy of an Illness by Norman Cousins. I started working toward finding out how I was going to wean myself off the medicine I was on in the first place. The medicine I was on worked like synthetic adrenaline. I felt that I needed to jump start my two adrenal glands so I did that. I am not going to share with you how I did because it was unorthodox and unsafe, but long story short, I got my body to start working on its own again.
I started working out and changed my diet and found meditation. I did not miss one day of meditation over the first five years, sometimes even meditated twice a day. I changed the way I dealt with stress (my poor wife) and I made changes so quick to my life that she was living with a different guy every week. I saw improvement in my health in 6 months and saw solid bowel movements with that. I was doing well, no medicine and solid bowel movements, healthy weight and mind, but was still afraid that it was luck and sometimes felt like I was waiting for the other shoe to drop.
I realized I needed to create, in my head, a new life without sickness or the fear of being sick. A life that had no limits, no bounds. I started to create a life in which I challenged myself to grow and learn. I started working on my learning disabilities and working on creating so much more. I had to take the weight of my life onto own my shoulders and never stop walking my path. I never stopped to look back. Now twenty years have gone by and I am sharing my life with you. Even this blog and my websites www.ihealedmycrohnscolitis.com and www.universalsourcehealing.com are part of my creation and healing.
What I shared with you tonight is my life with my sickness, my body, my time table. Each of our stories are different, each of our bodies are different, and each of our will to heal or change are different. This is how I became a matter of fact guy and why I sometimes come off as being a hard ass when I write. If I was not that way I would have died, because I would have given up. Sometimes when you are up against something like chronic illness you have to just get tough.
I Healed my Crohn's Colitis 