Day 98

I just walked into the kitchen and suckled a tomato. It was dark as blood on the inside and lycopene sweet, and I knew I couldn't have any more than the half I had already sliced and eaten. I lifted the butt end slice, held it up like a fine caviar hors d'oeuvre, and sucked down the taste of summer.

Now my stomach hurts.

I miss eating everything. I miss the stuff stuff of mindless consumption and having more calories in one meal than some families get in a day; the greasy crazy mouth explosions and the whatever's in the fridge, I'm too busy to think about food kind of eating. I crave culinary abandon.

Instead, I have become an austere observer. The food is before me. I feel for the jolt of adrenaline that tells me this food will hurt me. Maybe I hope for the calm I feel when I think I will get through the day on these particular calories. I'm muscle testing on my autonomic muscle, and I'm a little embarrassed about it. It's not like I get it right all the time. Who am I to trust myself when my own immune system is making me sick? Clearly I've been measuring something wrong.

Food enters my mouth on a subsiding exhale and I work it through a gateway of fear over what will happen next. I swallow. The smell of the food lingers and I ask my body if I am going to be okay. Then I rest. Then I eat again. At the end of the day I try to guess what made me better and what made me worse. It's a clusterfuck of varying factors and I laugh a little while I try to figure it out. I'm still 102 lbs and exhausted. Nothing is working well enough.

98 days ago my body began the flare up that would finally get me diagnosed. It escalated until I was weak and useless, scared and covered in night sweat. It brought me to that gurney on which I woke, drowsy and surprised, to the chopping ax of my diagnosis.

"It's Crohn's."

And just like that, I became a girl with a disease. The years of being tired, the effect of stress on my intestines, the vague muddle of my mind in the face of everyday tasks: all were tied with a bow and handed to me in a brand new box. I want to make that box my bitch. I want to take the whole image of girl with disease and knock it across the yard with a baseball bat. I want to grow and thrive again and I want to walk away, hands clapping across each other as I brush that bullshit off.

Here are my goals.

Gain 10 pounds

Get my Hgb up to 13 and maintain it there

Run 2-8 miles four days a week without pain

Spend my weekends playing hard, and have the energy to fully enjoy it. I want to hold nothing back.

Serve my patients with the compassion I needed and got this summer

Not for a moment give up on being beautiful just because I'm sick.