Picture it, my condo, July 2018. It had been two weeks since I saw the gastroenterologist and he diagnosed me with ulcerative colitis and prescribed prednisone, a corticosteroid to reduce the inflammation in my colon. The good news was that the medication worked. After more than five weeks of going to the washroom multiple times a day and horrible abdominal cramps, not to mention blood in my stool, a sore butthole, unexpected weight loss and moments of just breaking down and crying, I finally found relief and I was very happy.
Actually, I was more than very happy. Overjoyed? Ecstatic? No, no, I was downright euphoric. You see, the bad news was that the prednisone came with some wild side effects. A feeling of euphoria was one of them. After only two weeks in and on a relatively high dose, I was feeling gooooood! My steroid induced “moonface” appeared overnight, but that was okay because the meds had me feeling so good that I thought I was a friggin’ supermodel! But the fun drug also made me super hyper and gave me insomnia. I was sleeping about five hours a night, but I didn’t feel it. I was constantly on the move cooking, cleaning, going outside for walks, researching my disease – you name it. I noticed that my judgement had been affected too because I wasn’t as indecisive as I was before, which I suppose could have been a good thing. However, I found that I was thinking less and doing more. If I woke up and felt like going downtown, I got ready and left. A nice pair of nude flats that I absolutely did not need that were not on sale? Sure! I found myself in some sort of perpetual “treat yo’self” mode and bought anything and everything I wanted. This would not have been a problem had it not been for the fact that I was off work and not getting paid. A fun fact I didn’t fully process until several weeks later. In addition to this superficial joy, I also developed an insatiable appetite. I was eating like a beast! Or at least that’s how I felt. I wasn’t eating huge, greasy meals because that would have aggravated my gut. I was eating small meals, but frequently. Very frequently. I was pretty much constantly snacking and on everything, especially sweets. I have a major sweet tooth and hadn’t been able to enjoy any sweets while I was flaring (experiencing diarrhea). So once I was able to add normal food back to my diet, I started devouring sweets like a fiend.
I emailed my GI with one of my weekly updates and let him now that the side effects had appeared and that he had significantly downplayed them when he prescribed the meds. Without too many questions he quickly gave me a schedule to start tapering off of the prednisone. A schedule that would take me several weeks to get off of the fun drug.
It wasn’t a completely happy time for me though. You know the movie Limitless with Bradly Cooper? That’s kind of how I felt except in the movie the drug he took made him think clearly and for me, my head was very foggy 90% of the time. I was thinking more, but it didn’t make sense so I wasn’t exactly on that genius level like B-Coop. But thoughts were racing through my head constantly and with the hyperactivity there was zero procrastination. Combined with the euphoria, I felt invincible. Seriously. The side effects were strong and freaked me out because I didn’t feel like myself at all. I didn’t recognize who I was anymore. My face and body looked different and I felt different. While I enjoyed the constant sunny disposition, I couldn’t get off of the medication fast enough.
So I started doing my own research about prednisone and found that I should take it before 9am to help mimic the body’s natural secretion of cortisol. Well, shit. That information would have been useful from the onset. Taking it earlier in the morning also helped with my insomnia. My routine had become: bed by 11pm, wake up around 3am, fight to fall back asleep until about 8am and wake up again at 11am, have breakfast and take the prednisone. After I started taking the medication before 9am, I noticed a change in my sleep pattern and I slowly started sleeping longer through the night. Hallelujah! What also may have helped this was that I started to exercise. To be specific, I would head down to the gym in my building and try to drain my excess energy and cortisol through the elliptical machine because I read that exercise helps to decrease cortisol. I can’t remember why now, but I had made the connection that between what my body was naturally producing and what the prednisone was synthetically providing, I had too much cortisol in my body. When I started on the elliptical I was shocked. I hadn’t exercised in months and all of a sudden I was killing it on this machine! My speed was ridiculous and after 45 minutes I didn’t feel tired at all. In fact, it made me more hyper. But I noticed that timing was everything and even though exercising made me more hyper, if I did it early in the morning, my hyper sensation started to wear off throughout the day and by bedtime I felt calmer. So I kept this up. By the way, for those of you who have seen Limitless, you will recall that there is a part where Cooper also finds a routine that helps him manage the drug more effectively. Just saying.
So things started looking up slightly. I was still feeling high and cloudy-headed most of the day, but my sleep was improving and I felt like I was taking back a little bit of the control I had lost since being diagnosed. It was about six or seven weeks after I started taking the prednisone that I figured out my routine and I was still feeling constant joy and wishing everyone peace and love and I was appreciating life. But something was still bothering me. In between the euphoric and hyper sensations, there was something unsettling. A feeling that I couldn’t identify or describe properly. This feeling or rather the fact that I couldn’t identify it kept nagging at me until I couldn’t take it anymore and I realized that I needed to talk to someone. So I found someone to talk to and without realizing it, that person managed to identify the unidentifiable feeling.
That's Me 