A Very Good Day, Indeed

I should have written this post yesterday when I was bursting with energy. Yesterday was a Very Good Eating Day. And it was desperately needed after the previous week. But I was too busy doing things like going to a bakery, doing our Rosh Hashanah shopping and in doing so, walking 9/10th of a mile to write anything.

This detail may not seem important now, but it will make sense further down in the post. Acupuncture seems to be helping with my external abdominal sensitivity so that my acupuncturist was able to put needles there for the first time since we started working together. I mention this because things just kept going my way.

This morning? Jackpot. I woke up early (6:30am) and I felt great! So great that by 10am, I had drunk more supplement than I had on either Friday or Saturday of last week! And, although the nausea is creeping in, At 2pm, I have already had more supplement than I have had on any single day since the move!

But wait, there’s more. And this is huge! I picked up my crochet for the first time since our move!!!!!!! Oh, how I have missed fiber crafting. It was absolutely amazing to feel the yarn in my hands again. It was mentally exhausting, but that was mostly me figuring out exactly where I was in the pattern (I stopped in the middle of a repeat, and although I marked it well, my brain still needed to reacclimate). I wasn’t the only happy one this morning. Xena Malka was absolutely thrilled to see the yarn again. First she spent some time attacking the yarn tail, but then she got down to business and made sure than my yarn bag was fully marked as hers.

As promised, some details on my abdominal sensitivity. For reasons that no one can explain, sometimes Gastroparesis makes one’s abdomen very sensitive to touch. My sensitivity is primarily between my belly button and my solar plexus and could be triggered by the lightest touch. I couldn’t wear clingy fabrics because they triggered a very hard to describe, but incredibly unpleasant overwhelming feeling. It was so all encompassing that I couldn’t think or focus because all I could think about was getting the fabric off my skin.

And it wasn’t just fabric. I had to keep my arms away from my torso because just brushing across my abdomen set off that horrible feeling. This summer, after I put all of my oversized clothes in storage, the waistband of pants and skirts started to bother me. Even loose waistbands started triggering the misery. Fortunately, I was still able to tolerate a truly oversized pair of Pac Man pajama bottoms that rely entirely on my hips to stay up.

When I first started acupuncture, the acupuncturist asked me to lay on my stomach. Laying on my stomach is, as you might imagine, was incredibly uncomfortable. So I said nope. Then he wanted to palpate my gut. Another big nope. In fact, I couldn’t even handle the light pressure he needed to put needles in my abdomen. So he started at my extremities with the goal of moving inward.

Now, after just a few weeks of treatments, I was comfortable enough to let him start putting needles in my abdomen. But that is not the only change. Not only am I wearing a clingy tank top under my shirt, but I just had to check that it was still on because I couldn’t tell. And I have gotten my pants and skirts back because I am back to be able to tolerate waistbands. Is this magic all because he could finally put needles in my abdomen? Maybe. Maybe not. But if I have learned anything in the past year and a half, you have to embrace the good days, so for the moment, that is where all of my focus is.

Lastly, here is some more good news. I now have an intake appointment with the doctor who is doing the endoscopic procedure on October 19th. Presumably he will schedule the procedure after that. In the meantime, Kate Farms, the folks who make my formula, have just released a chocolate 1.4 formula, which has more calories than the ones I have been living on. I bought a couple of cases to help ratchet up my nutrition, especially on Bad Days.