more of the uncensored me: acupuncture is liberating
well winter has arrived with full force in this part of the country with snow and ice. my hands and feet are cold and the raynaud's is acting up again. luckily i have acupuncture again in a week and i can't wait. i hope that it starts to help with the raynaud's. it really seems to be helping improve my baseline. i'm nowhere near recovered or in remission or anything like that but at least it's helping me have enough energy to add running/walking to my swimming regimen.
something strange has happened though. although acupuncture seems to be helping in a subtle way with the hair loss, headaches, fever and fatigue, i've noticed i feel a lot more irritable, bitchy and emotional lately. my acupuncturist had warned me that it might happen although mainly after the first treatment as my body fights to bring things into balance. instead though i've noticed that i'm a lot more short tempered, i've become teary at the drop of a hat, and often i feel like a brooding angry bitch (which i'd like to think i'm not most of the time at least).
anyway, any improvement is welcome. i really like my acupuncturist. he has a great reputation here and another woman i know with a similar illness goes to him and looks and feels much better under his treatment. he's so great because he also checks in to see where i'm at emotionally before each treatment, rather than being all cold and detached and treating me like a pin cushion. actually something very liberating happened at a recent session.
he had been wanting to get a better picture of my illness and what was out of balance. and something was eating away at me, namely the fear that i somehow exacerbated my the evolution of my illness....not caused it.....but helped it develop into a full fledged autoimmune illness. the truth is this: i had some long standing body image problems. i am not and never was a fat person... and so i know how irrational it is to have this issue to struggle with and it sounds so lame when there are other things to worry about. if other people knew of my body image concerns they'd probably think i'm vain or shallow and it's not that at all.
it all started because i hit puberty at a young age and had my period the summer after 4th grade....a real blow to my self esteem. awkward being a head taller than everyone. it made me feel like i stuck out, even though looking back on it, i didn't really stick out.
i actually never went to real extremes to control my weight until college. in high school i was busy swimming and running track and running a 6 minute mile and excelling academically and so although the issues were just under the surface i never obsessed or acted on my body image insecurities. but i'm very very ashamed to admit that during my stessful sophomore year and my junior year in college i stopped eating for a while. i luckily i never lost my menstrual cycle, though. it's so painful for me to talk about even now that i'm 28 and it's beeen 8-9 years. it's hard to explain but a lot of stuff led to my doing so...just the stress of trying to be in control and the power trip i got from feeling like i could ignore hunger and at the same time run on empty by running 6 miles every day and even add lap swimming to it on some of those days. it's so crazy because it was so insidious and i didn't realize how unhealthy it was.
then i hit the wall my junior year when i got very sick with the flu and they also discovered how sick i was from not eating. i know this is so terrible but i just feel better in finally facing up to the facts. they found me to iron deficiency anemic, have low protein stores, low ferritin (iron stores), and most alarmingly, to have ketones in my urine...a sign that my body was starting to eat itself and burn my own fat and muscle stores. when the nurses at the health center told me about my lab results i felt like i'd been caught red handed, committing some kind of sin and doing something awful and that they'd discovered my secret--that i was starving myself. god, it was a dark time in my life. there was a lot behind why i did it but to make a long story short, i can't help but wonder if abusing my body in that particular way lowered my defenses against the formation of an autoimmune disease. i guess i have to live with that question forever because we'll never know.
anyway, to get back on track from my rambling, i told my acupuncturist what had happened. it was the first time i had ever confided in anyone about that. not even my friends know (although in college each one at some point had confronted me about an eating disorder and i of course denied it vehemently). none of my family or any of my doctors know either. i guess maybe now that my acupuncturist knows about my full history it can help lead to better treatment than would have been the case if i'd withheld it. i guess it took courage on my part and i feel so relieved and liberated after unburdening that terrible secret from my heart.
my guilt on this matter is doubled when i realize that my bone density is lower than it should be. of course, it may be entirely due to my prednisone treatment in 2000, which led me to develop bone loss and a stress fracture, from which i seem to be recovering from.
now i simply have to be careful not to let those demons get a hold of me again. i'm doing okay although i don't think issues with body image, weight or food ever completely go away. it's just how you handle them and keep them in check. (i have more to write later on this although my readers probably find me incredibly boring and bitchy).
i guess that some people will still see me as nothing but petite loveliness at a dynamic 5'2. but suffice it to say that while my heart is telling me that my ideal weight is under 110 lbs., i know in my head that it's okay for me to weigh 115 or 120 because of the muscles i have from exercising. anyway.......i am way too tired to go on and so will go now and write the rest later. i have very little privacy around here. sorry!
