If I Had To Do It All Over Again

I do not live with regrets.  Regret is a four letter word.  Yeah I know it's six, but it is a foul word that I never use in my vocabulary.  Regret means you wish it never happened.  Every mistake I have made has had a purpose in my life, and I do not wish it never occurred.  Instead I have grown from them and they shaped me into who I am today.

However, there are things I would change if I could.  One of those things is something I still do to this day.  The one thing I would do if I could do it all again is listen to my body.  I can be very stubborn when I want to be, and I am most stubborn with how I feel.  I have a huge phobia of being portrayed as weak, so I carry on acting normal no matter how sick I may feel.  This has got to change.

I learned to ignore cues from my body long ago.  It intensified when I became anorexic because I did not want to listen to the hunger cries.  Ulcerative Colitis also had it's hand because I wanted to ignore the pain and the fatigue.  I would push through each signal my body gave me just so that I could do what I wanted to do despite the consequences.  Each time I continued through the screams I found myself in the hospital.

I remember clearly the summer of my last flare and the beginning of the end of my colon.  I could feel myself getting weaker and weaker.  I could see myself turning white as a ghost.  I could no longer eat without pain and finding myself living in the bathroom.  Fevers would come each night leaving me shivering in the peak of the summer.  Yet I continued to work 12 hour days doing my full time job during the day and showing houses in the evenings.  I couldn't say no.  I remember how tired I was on the 4th of July going to picnics and refusing all foods except for the safest, smallest amounts.  Then I had a routine doctor's appointment that ended up changing my life.  Soon as my GI doctor walked into the exam room he said to me, "Which hospital are you going to?"  My husband had predicted it that morning when he said, "I'll see you later tonight in the hospital".  Everyone could see it but me.  I eventually had three hospital stays that year, and I never slowed down.

And I still haven't learned.  I still run myself ragged ignoring everything my body is telling me.  I still work long days, volunteer, go to the gym, and have time for my friends and family whenever I can fit them in.  I don't stop from the time I wake up to the time I crash.  I run myself so hard that I can't even sit down to watch TV without falling asleep.  I know this is my body telling me to slow down, but I can't stop myself.  I am trying to listen because I know what the end is if I don't.  If I could do each day again, I would make myself sit down and relax.  There is nothing more important than my health.