I finally got a regular night’s sleep. Tried adding potatoes to the diet yesterday, don’t think I’m ready yet. Made my tum feel weird and my poo has gone back to a 5. Today I tried eating a raw apple and had some considerable bloating. I’ll keep up the whole grains for another two weeks and try adding in pulses.
Slept a solid 6 hours. I did manage to take a nap mid day. Got some advice from a dear friend about some physical therapy moves for pain.
Toast + pb + jam, apple juice, coffee, oatmeal + almonds + dates + coconut, whole wheat pasta + evoo + nutritional yeast.
First solid 4 poo since my flare started. That’s right bitches!
Coffee, toast + PB, banana, oatmeal, whole wheat pasta, apple juice.
Been coasting along with about the same daily symptoms, and eating the same standard foods. I added in dirty rice yesterday. It was made with white rice and was not very filling. Whole grains y’all!
Still on the steroids. Side effects: insomnia, tension and feeling “up” all the time, lack of sleep causing mental fatigue.
Coffee, toast + peanut butter, banana, date, walnut, chocolate, dirty rice, oatmeal + coconut + almonds, whole wheat pasta + olive oil + nutritional yeast.
Please allow me to share with you the meditation techniques I have used to help with chronic pain and generalized anxiety and panic disorder. This shit works.
Beginner
Once or twice a day, check in with your self with a guided meditation. A short five minute video can help you practice and get in the practice of entering a meditative state. You will feel benefits pretty immediately.
You will probably only need to listen to a video or guided meditation a few times before you basically have it memorized and your body is learning the muscle memory of the exercise. I like videos because I know how much time I am putting into my practice.
A Focus On Pain
After you are in a meditative state, you can find the pain in your body. Visualize the pain. Give it a size, shape, texture, and volume.
Now focus on the rest of your body, or specifically something that is not in pain. I usually wiggle my toes or thumbs to connect more firmly to this larger, non-pain body. My non-pain body surrounds and envelops my pain.
Shift your focus back to your pain and experience it as long as you can handle without getting overwhelmed. Then focus back on your fingers or toes. Switching your focus like this plays into somatic theories of pendulation and titration.
Like a pendulum, you are passing back and forth between a manageable and an unmanageable sensation. This helps you break up feelings of being out of control with feelings of comfort control and normalcy.
Titration is about slowly increasing your tolerance to unmanageable sensations. We start slow, and just dip our toe in. Eventually that sensation becomes manageable, and we can lean further into experiencing this unmanageable sensation.
Blur the Edges of Acute Pain
Once I have located and visualized the pain in my body, and I have felt the non-pain body around and containing my pain, I spread out my non-pain body to allow the pain more room.
I relax the boundary or the edges of my acute pain by visualizing the shape of my pain getting blurry. The pain is blurring into my non-pain body. As it spreads, it may feel less acute or less restricted. Continue this visualization with deep breath, expanding your non-pain body as you breathe.
Now entering the second week of steroids for my Crohn’s flare. What is people? What is human interaction? Maybe I’ll be able to do that again in 2 months when I’ve tapered off Prednisone.
I have my telehealth visit the day before I’m supposed to go back to work. Hopefully my job will understand my disability and let me phone it in for teacher work week.
And now, some advice from the Centers of Disease Control:
Symptoms have levelled out for the past few days, today is typical. 40mg steroid a day for one more week.
Toast/pb/jam, coffee, whole wheat pasta, 4 bananas
Shoulder/kneck pain since I woke up. Got telehealth appt with GI for Aug 4. The next in person availability was Oct 26. I would be dead by then. No quinoa no bloating better poo.
Coffee, toast + pb + jam, oatmeal + dates + nuts + coconut, apple juice
Stop eating quinoa. Everything else the same.
Symptoms
This day was rough. BM condition got worse. Called my PCP to see if she could order me an Rx for steroids. I started taking 40mg steroids a day to stop the flare (I have a giant bottle left from the last flare in 2017). Can’t afford other treatment options and don’t want to spend $$$ on a specialist visit to the GI if I can.
Pain all day in my middle abdomen, right around my belly button.
Toast with raspberry jam and peanut butter, coffee, rice + lentils, whole wheat pasta, oatmeal + almonds + coconut shreds, apple juice.
Eating Vegan with Crohn's Disease 