MY EATING DISORDER STORY AND THE PRICE I PAY FOR IT NOW // CHRONIC ILLNESS

Hey Steemiacs, good to be back here!
I was away for what felt to me like a lifetime, even though I'm sure none of you really felt my absence :p

I was (and still am) very ill in the last few days, I spent all of my time in bed with terrible abdominal pain and spent the rest of my time sitting in the toilet crying, wishing things would stop coming out of my ass.
So even though I had other topics I wanted to cover this weekend, I thought this would be a good opportunity to spark up a conversation about my chronic condition.

Just to make a few things clear, I'm not whining, bitching, feeling sorry for myself (ok maybe a little), or doing this for attention. I am also not sharing this because I am looking for help. I am not searching for the next applesauce diet or some sort of witch doctor. I am merely sharing this to vent out a little, and also for anyone who's currently struggling with their health, mental or physical (even though I can't promise I have a happy ending). So grab a beverage and join me cause this is gonna be a bumpy, long ride.

I used to suffer from digestive issues my whole life. Since I can remember myself, my family used to call me names for always farting. I had the worst gas pain that actually prevented me from standing or walking. I never wanted to be a nuisance (I know now it's ok to ask for help, even though I hardly ever) so I never said I had a stomach ache. To be fair? I couldn't even say the word stomach. The only relief would be after several long hours when things finally started moving, and I was able to release some flatulence. I was so ashamed of my body (thanks fam) that I would keep my farts in while in public and end up going home in such tremendous pain that I would need a whole day to recover.

When I was 17 I decided to go vegan. I stopped having stomach aches that would rip my insides and I felt fucking amazing. But a year after that, my dickhead boyfriend gave me a UTI a day before I flew to the Netherlands, and I had to go to the emergency room and take antibiotics from hell that have ruined my system. Shortly after that, I started suffering from candida, a vaginal yeast infection that turned out to be systematic and wreaked havoc in my body. My bartholin gland clogged and created a cyst that turned into an abscess (while all this time my shitty boyfriend pushed me to have sex with him and it only aggravated the situation). I’ve had that for some years until I got the gland removed in my first surgery ever.

Being the person that I am, I do not trust doctors. A lot of them are brilliant and helpful but I just don't really believe the system has genuine intentions. So instead of taking a medication for my candida, I did pretty much everything else.
I tried tea tree oil, pushing garlic cloves up my vag, probiotics and even fasting. I went on that insane candida diet that prohibits carbs, sugars and anything good really, and I lost weight quickly. Everyone around me were complimenting me on my weight loss and it made me feel good inside.

I kept that diet up for almost a year and then went back to my usual vegan diet feeling better with my candida, but more determined than ever to lose weight, as much as I can as fast as I can. My anorexia was the last way I had to deal with my depression and anxiety (more on that in a different post). I remember consciously thinking I can just convert all of my issues for calories and food, and that would be a lot easier, right? Wrong.

It took me about a year to reach rock bottom and get to my lowest weight, but I was more miserable than ever. My brain was starving for so long that I became suicidal and couldn't see a way out. I got hospitalized for a year in a mental hospital and started to gain some weight back.

I was still underweight when they kicked me out of treatment without any excuse, and turns out I was underweight for several years in a row. I got better slowly, but those years have cause permanent and irreversible damage to my body.
I now have mild osteoporosis, which is when your bones lose their density and you can break your bones like little twigs very easily. I mostly don't feel my osteo because I haven't broken anything yet (just small fractures here and there), but I definitely feel a lot of pressure on my bones while doing normal everyday things like wearing a heavy coat or walking in heels. I also have costochondritis attacks once in a while, which is when the cartilage in my ribs get inflamed and i cant move cause its literally the worst pain I've ever felt.

So after I went back to my normal weight and got my sanity back (at least parts of it), I went to uni, lived life and I was cool for a few years. However, one day, I started feeling my vagina itch like a motherfucker and I realized that candida, the bitch, is back. It's been a few years so I did some more internet research to see what's new in the candida field, and realized that there is a fruit diet thingy, where you just eat fruit and no fats and that's supposed to clean your blood from accumulated fat and pave the way for the clean sugar to enter the cells without having the candida eat it all and grow. Sound perfect right? Eat as much fruit as you want and the candida will go back to normal. Being a diet expert by this point, I didn't even think twice before going for it.

I couldn't keep it up for more than 3 months. It was boring, expensive, cumbersome and omg I NEEDED salt. I don't even like fruit that much! I quit and moved on with life and felt good for another 2 years.

One day, I had sex with this bdsm fuckboy that gave me trichomonas. The bastard was so infected he passed it on to me even though we used a fucking condom. I didn't think much of the fact that my vagina smelt like a dead fish until one day I started having intense pain in my uterus and went to the hospital. Not only I had a sex disease, but I also had pelvic inflammatory disease which is the devil itself. I required a big batch of several antibiotics and that was the beginning of this current chapter in my life.

A week after the antibiotics, candida was back in all its cottage cheese glory and I immediately started the fruit diet again to combat it. But one week in, it was a Friday (I hate Fridays), I was out and all of a sudden I started feeling the worst nausea of my life. I thought I was gonna throw up then and there and being emetophobic (vomiting phobia) I would rather die than vomit. It took about 30-50 minutes for the nausea to turn into the worst stomach ache and a terrible need to take a shit. I found a toilet and started feeling better only after that.

Pre poop nausea became a daily routine for years, even a few times a day but usually at 5PM things would take a turn in my stomach (pun intended). Up till this day I don't know what is the cause to this, was it the antibiotics? Was it the insane fruit diet? One thing I was mostly sure of was that it was some sort of nerve damage, and I assumed it was my vagus nerve that took the toll.

Not only nausea was prevalent. The amount of shits I was taking daily wasn't even human. I was pooping 7 times a day on a good day, and it didn't take me more than 5 hours from when I ate something, till I saw it in the toilet coming out the other end. Sometimes I think I didn't even digest or absorb any of it. I was weak, angry, fucking hungry, and terrified of eating anything else outside of the fruit diet. Whatta Ya know, I've developed another eating disorder, and this time it was orthorexia.

I cannot even explain the levels of obsession I had with this fruit diet. All I thought about all day was fruits. I only hung out with fruit eating friends, I moved to a fruity country so I can eat cheap fruits with a fruit eating community (Thailand) and I just ate a fuck ton of fruit. I was hungry very quickly, but couldn't eat large portions of food cause fruits are so high in water and fiber content that I felt like death after a meal. I used to plan my meals weeks in advance. After a while I was so over it, but whenever I tried to eat anything else, I felt so sick and my stomach didn't know what to do with this new food.

Not long after I moved to Thailand that I've had my first gastroenteritis episode. I ate some cut up pineapple from a street vendor and soon after that I’ve had serious stomach ache and nausea. I had to take at least a million shits under my bungalow and I was just squating there, peeing out of my asshole while all along I think I’m gonna throw up and I get into an 8 hour panic attack. I got so dehydrated and was somehow taken to a hospital. I made it there with hypothermia (who gets fucking hypothermia in a tropical country? Just Henya things) and severe dehydration. They tried to get me on the drip but they couldn't find a vein, and me being scared to death from vomiting, I couldn't drink. It honestly felt like I was going to die. I was deteriorating fast, but then, after poking me all over they finally found a vein and I got some fluids in.

5 days in the hospital and I still wasn't better. 30 diarrheas a day, can't eat, stayed conscious only while on the drip, I was transferred to another hospital in a bigger city and got proper treatment finally. Another week past and I was mostly better. But my stomach hasn't been the same since then.

2 months later I traveled to Taiwan. I contracted another bacteria while eating and came down with gastritis. This time it was so awful, that I was praying to die. I was taken with an ambulance to the hospital and I’ve had the worst nausea of my life. I was literally swallowing my own vomit every second and I was in a terrible panic attack all the while. They gave me a few shots to calm me down but only the second hit of valium did anything to me (I used to have a valium addiction). Long story short, I left the hospital, refused the meds and did a 5 days fast to recover, but it only made me worse. I then ate only bananas for a month and then continued with my crazy fruit diet for a few more months until I realized I can't go on like this anymore.

I developed functional dyspepsia at that point. That’s when your stomach doesn't produce digestive fluids and doesn’t do anything to push food down to the small intestines, and lets food ferment in your stomach for days. I couldn't digest food, I took 10 shits a day, I had the worst abdominal pain and I lost so much weight. Oh and my 5pm nausea got even worse. That was 3 years ago.

Since then I’ve tried acupuncture, exercise, the low fodmap diet, antidepressants, going back to valium, ginger, turmeric, probiotics, weed (in countries where it was legal!) and basically anything under the sun. Nothing helped (maybe weed helped a bit). I’ve done every test possible and found nothing wrong with me. Ultrasounds, sibo test, gluten and fructose intolerance test, I even got a tube with a camera shoved up my ass, aka colonoscopy, and I’ve seen countless doctors. No one could tell me what is wrong with me.

It's been more than 3 years that I’ve had these symptoms. The nausea has mostly subsided, and if I don't eat too much, my stomach usually handles what I eat and pushes it down, but my intestines feel most of the time like there are a million burning holes in there and I can actually feel food moving around and ripping me open even more.
I poop a lot. Although, I can't remember the last time I had a solid poo and not a mix of undigested crap. I sometimes have bloody stools but I have to admit it's not most of the time, so I doubt that it is an inflammatory bowel disease, but I just cannot accept the IBS and functional dyspepsia bullshit that everyone is throwing at me.

IBS or irritable bowel syndrome is not a diagnosis. It is a group of symptoms that modern medicine has no tools to explain or solve, and we cant even get medical weed for it where I come from, because it’s "Mostly in your head". Gastro doctors have told me I need better tranquilizers cause I seem like I’m stressed out, and told me to try the low fodmap diet. No one investigates any further or has any idea what to do besides prescribing pills that don't work and only make things worse for me.

So in the past years I had to learn to live with insane abdominal pain on the daily. I wake up from the need to go to the toilet, I can't leave the house in the morning until I’m done taking all my morning shits, I then eat breakfast and shit that too, only then I can leave the house to start my day. I am almost always in pain. Sometimes it’s bearable, sometimes I have to push through the pain cause I can't live my life lying in bed, and sometimes its debilitating to a point where I can’t breathe or move and I wish I had the energy to kill myself.

Fast forward to this week, when I was in serious pain for most of it, just a bit of Tuesday and Thursday were fine, but it didn’t last long. On Thursday I started a new job and got fired this morning because I couldn't show up to work. I couldn't eat, drink, move or do anything cause I was in so much pain. I just began feeling slightly less worse these last few hours and was able to finally eat a freaking cracker (hurray to safe foods!) but I just can’t go on like this anymore.

Tomorrow I have a gastro appointment that I've been waiting for 6 months. I hope he will have some answers for me but at this point I just hope he won't be a little prick like all my previous doctors and treat me with a little respect.
So this is the price I'm paying for my eating disorders. My digestive issues will probably always be there just like the osteoporosis will always be there. I'm usually not a person that regrets anything in life, but if I could go back in time, I would never go on diets (or have sex with a bdsm fuckboy).

I just want to clarify, I have been vegan for 11 years now, I’ve been a healthy vegan before I got into eating disorders, and I would've been healthy now if it wasn't for them. Also, my osteoporosis would've been a lot worse if I wasn't vegan, since dairy and high protein animal products cause calcium to go out from your bones into your urine and out of your body. Veganism is not the cause of my illness and if anything it’s only making it better.
Either way, I'm not vegan for health and I do it because billions of animals are caged, tortured, raped and murdered for their milk, eggs, honey and flesh and even if it wasn't healthier to eat vegan (which it 100% is!), I still wouldn't take part in it.

I wish I had some positive things to say, but I just really wanted to get it out of me and tell you guys where I’m coming from, and for those of you who suffer from similar issues, just know you're not alone.

Thank for reading!
Much love,
Henya