Ups and Downs

So I always said that this blog was going to be about me being real with everyone that read it and I know that I have always claimed positivity is key however I am also going to be honest and say that I am not a permanent happy go lucky person and there have been points on this journey even in the first 6 weeks of coming out of hospital that have been REALLY hard. At about the 6 week point I had started back at the Sportspark doing some part time work as I have written about to try and phase my return back into the working world and also to save myself from going insane being at home on my own all the time but I was struggling with my mood and I think that there are a lot of factors in this. 

I had about a week where I was just down in the dumps and realistically being a bit of a child about everything. As I said to Jordan, I was being super sulky and I didn’t really know why. 

Overall I narrowed it down to not feeling like I was quite doing well enough. Since I had started back working my nutrition hadn’t been as good because I hadn’t had the same amount of time to dedicate to it, I missed one day on the fitness plan I had (although I did still technically go for a walk just not 90 minutes), my money hadn’t gone quite as well as I would have liked, I just felt like overall I wasn’t quite nailing this post diagnosis life as well as I would have liked to have. 

Now this might sound trivial but for someone who admittedly likes to see herself as someone that does relatively well at all of the things she attempts, not nailing something as simple as “living” was rather disheartening. 

To try and sort out my general funk, I did a few things, and none of them worked immediately, but as the title suggests, Ups and Downs.

First, I talked to my Mum who got me to on a percentage look at all of the things that I have been trying to tackle and to rate how well I had managed them. I am my own worst critic (as I am sure most people are) and so I was not that nice to myself. 

For exercise I rated myself pretty highly, 95%. I have stuck to the plan even when I really didn’t want to, at this point I had missed going for one walk which wasn’t too bad. So objectively, exercise wasn’t going too badly. I may not have been where I wanted to be in terms of exercise, I may have been less fit than I wanted to be, but in terms of sticking to the plan I was doing ok and that was the main thing. So exercise actually, doing ok. 

For nutrition the rating was nowhere near as high, 60%. This was not through lack of wanting to do it but through sheer confusion I think. I have a nutritionist who has been helping me to understand how nutrition affects gut health and especially for me, the effect of sugar on my system. I hadn’t realised how much sugar could affect (another blog post I think) everything! Anyway, the nutritionist was great and in the first week I was doing brilliantly well, I stuck to the plan, basically came off all high sugar foods and was feeling good. In week 2 I spoke again with the nutritionist and, I won’t lie, managed to then completely confuse myself. I was eating too much at lunch time as I was trying to eat more protein but I wasn’t planning anything, this then led to a defeatist attitude where I felt like I had “ruined the day” and so went and ate a load of things I probably shouldn’t have. Then I felt bad, tried again the next day and it was a cycle. I talked this all through with my Mum and realised that things had been overcomplicated and probably what I needed was a few meal ideas for lunch that I could pick and choose between and I knew the correct portions for. Hope that this will help me. There was finally a plan. I am a plan person.

Thirdly there was money. I mean this was was one I could not percentage because I didn’t know how I was doing. I felt like I wasn’t doing that well, but I am totally reliant on others at the minute and that’s really difficult for me. The system (government system that is) feels bound to make people fail in a way that works against people that have worked incredibly hard and while I am lucky enough to have a lot of support, a lot of support, I was feeling very down in the dumps about it all. Mum was there again to reassure me that she knew I was trying my hardest and that was all she needed me to do. When I came out of hospital we had budgeted out my outgoings in a month and worked out what I needed. Now the problem came that outgoings do change and there had been additional costs that we hadn’t reailsed were going to happen. For example, I now had to pay for more prescriptions than I ever needed to previously, I was spending money on counselling that hadn’t come out of my account before and all of these costs start to add up. Additional to this we hadn’t planned for me to be using my car that much but I was now travelling to work and back 3 times a week but often having to go up to the hospital because the doctors couldn’t get my blood. It all starts to add up. So we took stock and re-did the sums. 

I then started talking to my Dad about stuff as well. Not necessarily the same stuff as Mum but I told him I was down in the dumps and feeling like I wasn’t quite “winning” as I put it. Dad got me to look at all of the things that I had managed to achieve since coming out of hospital and all the positives that were going on. 

I am back exercising, and a set of stairs that used to feel like Everest most of the time can now be run up and down a few times in a workout session along with other exercises. I was able to do some running. No, it wasn’t where I was before hospitalisation but I was able to run again and this could only improve if I stuck at it. I had a supportive family who were helping me with money, so despite how broken the system is, I wasn’t going to end up in dire problems, it was going to be ok, one way or another. I had managed to come out of hospital and within two weeks had a job offer and was at this point only waiting on a DBS check to come through the post. At this point I had started working part time already as well so this was a positive, I was doing alright, just over a month out of hospital and I was back working in the best form that I could manage. I had recently started new medication and I hadn’t reacted to the starter dose of that – another positive! My steroids were also being reduced week on week and so I would hopefully start to see the reversal of some of the side effects from them as well. 

Overall my parents made me realise (completely separately) that I was doing alright and that it is totally natural to feel like there are some ups and downs on this journey and also to have periods where you think life is being seriously unfair to you. I was feeling like the diagnosis of Ulcerative Colitis for me was entirely unfair and that it shouldn’t have happened to me. 

Ups and Downs, Life will always have them and you have to be able to roll with them. I have started to work my way back, setting myself goals when I go out for a run so I feel like I have achieved something and can say “I ran for 20 minutes today”. I started deep cleaning the house so that every day I feel like I have achieved at least something (I really like cleaning so this was a good one for me to start before I went back to work especially). I tried to look at life a bit more positively, about where I had started and where I was now. Was I perfect? No. Was I enough? Yes. Was I trying my hardest? Most of the time. 

And in this weird and wonderful world, being enough is good enough and trying my hardest most of the time was also good enough. Nobody is perfect, so stop trying to be superwoman. 

So there we go, I am not a permanently happy go lucky person with a positive mental attitude to match. We all go through periods of feeling rubbish and getting down on ourselves.