"They tested God in
their heart by
demanding the food
they craved.
They spoke against
God, saying,
'Can God spread a
table in the
wilderness?'
He struck the rock
so that water gushed
out and streams
overflowed.
Can He also give bread
or provide meat
for His people?"
(Psalm 78:18-20)
My health challenge story begins 14 years ago when I was pregnant with our firstborn Caleb (probably longer, if you consider all the processed food which I grew up eating, the birth-control pills I began taking when we got married, and that I was a formula-fed baby). During pregnancy, I justified my desire to eat with the fact that I was eating for two, gaining 60 lbs in the process, even though I attempted to do a 'no sugar' diet towards the end. I can only imagine now the processed sugar-free junk I probably ate in attempts to do this. Yikes! What a recipe for future illness. My OB finally gave up on helping me stop gaining weight, telling me towards the end, "Just enjoy your pregnancy." Even though that big baby boy weighed 9 lbs, 11 oz, I still looked like I might be carrying twins a week after he was born!
Some of the weight gradually came off, and I was finally getting close to my pre-pregnancy weight when--you guessed it--I became pregnant again with Courtney. This time I did a little better, only gaining 40 lbs (which is way too much, but a victory after last time). She was also much smaller, a more normal 7 lbs, 2 oz. That's my girl!
But this birth rocked my world even more than the unexpected c-section of the first. I was exhausted beyond understanding, hardly able to climb the stairs in our home (and all our bedrooms and playroom were upstairs, so I needed to go up and down a lot). After six months I thought maybe this was not normal, even with a 2-year-old and newborn to mother. So I shared this with my doctor, and that is when I discovered I had hypothyroidism. I also had postpartum depression (who wouldn't, when you have no energy to do anything?) and ended up on anti-depressants for several months. Years later I learned this is common after giving birth to a girl, because your body has been producing extra progesterone for the baby girl, and now you have extra left behind. I know this to be true because I was given too much progesterone to take a few years ago and slunk into another depression until we figured out what was the cause. Wish someone would have warned me about this 12 years ago!
So I have now been on thyroid medication for 11 years (as many women are), and I have been taking progesterone for 5 years.
Eight years ago, however, something really rocked our world. In March of 2005, I began having nausea and cramps that I initially thought might mean I was pregnant. I even took a home pregnancy test because my symptoms were so constant. Not pregnant.
A couple of months later, the symptoms intensified and, while I was in Arlington, TX, speaking at a women's retreat, I began to be in so much pain and have so much diarrhea that I could hardly finish the retreat. The prayers of those women got me through, but now I knew it was time to seek medical help for whatever was going on in my body.
Gradually the pain in my gut increased so that I would spend two days at a time curled up in bed in intense abdominal pain, getting up only to relieve myself with diarrhea or by throwing up (several times a day). Then I would oddly feel better for a week or two. Then the intense pains, diarrhea, and vomiting would return.
The G.I. doctor ran every test and scan imaginable to determine what was causing all of this, and we finally agreed that, because a portion of my colon was "clogged up" and preventing things to move as they should, I would need surgery to remove about one-third of my colon. I managed to avoid serious steroids like Prednisone, but did have to take other medications to relieve the pain and help my bowels to move as much as possible. The gas and bloating were miserable as well.
In January of 2006, as I was coming home from a pastors' wives' retreat in Illinois, I began to feel awful in the Chicago O'Hare airport. Oh no! Not here, Lord! To top it off, my gate was changed and I had a LONG distance to walk to get to the new gate--which, in that airport, can be quite a trek...and it was. How appropriate that we had just spent the weekend learning about
"The Bent-over Woman" from
Luke 13:10-17. I was trusting my Lord Jesus for healing. I was a very bent-over woman.
By the time I landed in Denver late that night (we lived in Monument, CO at the time) and drove home, I was feeling worse. I ended up on the toilet while my family was sleeping peacefully. I was confined to the bathroom all night long, alternating between diarrhea and vomiting for the next several hours, growing weaker with each round. When Michael awoke in the morning and found me, I had hardly any energy left, and he knew he needed to get me to the hospital asap. A friend came to stay with the kids in those wee hours of the morning, and we headed for the ER.
I will spare you all the gory details, but I was hospitalized for two weeks between the process of emptying my system so they could do surgery and then recovering after surgery. The surgeon removed one-third of my upper colon, and the pathology report came back stating that it was "consistent with Crohn's disease." Finally, a name. Sometimes it's just helpful to be able
to name it.
The only things the colorectal surgeon could tell me to avoid were smoking (never have anyway) and Ibuprophen (I usually use Tylenol), so that didn't help us much in trying to prevent from ending up on the operating table again. "Nope", the G.I. doctor and the surgeon both said, "there is no proven link to anything dietary that can prevent or correct this issue with your colon and digestive system. It could flare up in 6 months, 6 years, or never. We just have no way of knowing."
Really?????
A disease of the gut cannot be proven to be related to diet in any way?????
Odd.
(more another day...but in the meantime you might find the information on these two sites rather insightful:
The Paleo Mom and
Chris Kresser)
