Well, it’s been a while. I’m going to jump right in and start with a date I had in June. We’ll call him Jay because frankly I don’t remember his name at this point. Jay and I met online of course and he seemed nice and nerdy. Plus he had a tattoo, so naturally he was right up my alley. We exchanged text messages and decided to meet for dinner one evening. Now, he wasn’t smiling in any of the pictures on his profile and I was aware that that was a red flag, but I ignored it because he was nice and I enjoyed our conversations. Worst case scenario, his teeth weren’t straight or he had a gap. I could deal with that. He met me at the restaurant and smiled. I was taken aback because at first it looked like he was missing all of his top teeth. I had to wait until we reached the table to realize that he wasn’t missing any teeth. As it turned out, all of his top teeth were really small with the exception of one of his canine teeth, which was significantly longer than the rest. It wasn’t the only thing that was off-putting about his appearance though. I came to realize that his profile pictures were also quite old. He looked heavier in his pictures. Healthier really. In person, however, he was quite thin and his face looked like he hadn’t eaten in weeks. Funny thing was, he hadn’t been eating that much. He said he was participating in a weight loss challenge at work.
Before I continue, I need to explain what was happening with my own health at the time. My stomach issues had returned about a week or so before my date with Jay and I was seeing a naturopath and trying to get things under control. Things weren’t as bad as they had been at other times I’d experienced tummy troubles, but I was being careful with what I ate and eating very little.
Despite being caught off guard by Jay’s appearance, I enjoyed his company and we did seem to have a lot in common, so I agreed to another date with him. We decided to see a movie the following week. Now, anyone who knows me knows that I love horror movies and Hereditary had just been released. When we first started talking, Jay said he also liked horror movies, so naturally I suggested we see Hereditary. Imagine my surprise when he said he had to be “in the right mental state” to see a horror movie. What kind of bullshit is that? Unless you’ve just spent a night in a haunted mansion or escaped a haunted asylum, a horror movie aficionado is always in the mood to see a horror movie. This was the second red flag for me. We decided to see The Avengers: Infinity War, even though he had already seen it. Unfortunately, my stomach issues had become worse by then and I missed about 20 minutes of the movie because I had to rush to the washroom. After the movie I felt like crap and I was hungry so I asked Jay if he wanted to get something to eat. He said no because he was on a water diet that week. A water diet. There I was having the contents of my stomach emptied every few hours and not being able to eat much more than a rice cracker and this idiot was voluntarily eating nothing because he wanted to win some competition at work. I was angry and exhausted and completely turned off. That was the end of Jay.
As I mentioned, I had been seeing a naturopath about my stomach issues and at this point I will dive into the nitty gritty. I had been having bouts of acute diarrhea that lasted two weeks at a time. This had been occurring almost every month since February and each time I saw my family doctor she told me it was a virus, even though a test in March confirmed that there was blood in my stool. I got tired of what seemed like a lazy and inaccurate diagnosis and at that point I was waiting to see a specialist, so I went to a naturopath. My stomach was fine when I went to the naturo, but then another bout of diarrhea started slowly. The naturopath did a test and told me I was sensitive to gluten and dairy and suspected that I had too much yeast in my gut so she put me on a diet to eliminate gluten, dairy, yeast and sugar. In case you’re wondering, it meant I was mainly eating fruit, vegetables and meat. She also suggested I eat chia seeds, nuts and oats. So I did. But after four weeks of diarrhea and one week on this diet, I was going to the washroom almost 10 times a day and I had lost about 20 pounds. I looked and felt like the living dead. Scared and frustrated I went back to my family doctor and basically said, “What the fuck?” Frightened for her career, she called the gastroenterologist and bumped up my appointment to the next week. I saw the GI the next week and my mother went with me. I felt like Dorothy in that episode of The Golden Girls when she was sick and Sophia went to the doctor with her. After an uncomfortable, yet necessary procedure the same day, the GI diagnosed me with ulcerative colitis.
I was relieved to have a diagnosis that wasn’t “a virus”, but I still had diarrhea and was five weeks in by then. It also didn’t help that pretty much everything the naturopath told me to eat aggravated my ulcerative colitis and the things I wasn’t supposed to eat were the foods that brought me some relief. The GI told me to eat a low fiber diet and prescribed a steroid to stop the inflammation in my intestines and ultimately the diarrhea. And that friends, is when the fun really began.
That's Me 