On Day 18 of the Specific Carbohydrate Diet, for the first time in over a month, I had the energy not only for a walk but for a real workout.
I did yoga in my sunroom for twenty minutes, reveling in the ability to stretch and let my weight sink into my legs, breathing deeply in and out. I felt strong, but my arms—what I could see of them—looked thin and gray after months of ulcerative colitis. When I capped off the yoga with some push-ups and sit-ups, I could do far fewer than in my previous life.
I imagined my cells reawakening now, busying themselves, getting excited to patch things up and strengthen. I pictured tiny holes in my withered bones filling in, gray material turning into a solid, gleaming white.
Things were so much better on this diet. When I’d begun it, I’d been so exhausted that I often lay on the couch for days. On many pre-SCD days, I’d spent hours in so much abdominal pain that it made me nauseous. That gut pain had now subsided. And I was thrilled at my uptick in energy—I still had days of the fatigue and “weirdness” that seemed to accompany this diet, but those were becoming fewer now that the first two weeks had passed.
Today, on Day 18, I’d had no muscle aches or strange leg cramps. I hoped something had adjusted within me. Maybe my body was now expecting a pound of meat a day and a bunch of homemade probiotic yogurt. Maybe I’d crossed over into some Mongolian or Maasai way of digesting, with lots of animal products, little fiber, and few plants.
I still doubted this meaty diet was good for me in the long run. But at least today, pain-free as I was, I had some hope that it was healing my colon.
Today was a Sunday. I spent the day preparing for Monday, for a writing workshop that would last all week. I was nervous about the workshop. For the last two months, as I’d coped with my illness, I’d had little pressure to do much besides rest and heal. It was miraculous timing—the worst of my disease had hit right as I was wrapping up one job and beginning to look for another. In August, Ron and I would move to Portland, Oregon, my hometown. The slow transition I’d built into my life was now giving me space to nurse my illness.
But for one week, starting tomorrow, I’d be in class all day. I would leave the security of home, with its well-stocked fridge and its private toilet and comfy couch. I was packing a bag full of my special food: almond butter, hardboiled eggs, honey-mustard salmon, grape jello, probiotic cheesecake, ultra-ripe banana. I wouldn’t be able to eat any of the “goodies” or the lunch I saw listed on the writing workshop’s online program.
I supposed I would just have to sit at the formally laid table at lunch, fending off well-meaning servers, explaining myself over and over to other writers as I ate my almond butter directly out of the jar and then cracked my hardboiled egg open on my bare white plate.
I prayed that I would ferret out a secret bathroom in the building that no one else knew about. Or that I’d be able to go at times when the bathroom was empty, so that no one would hear the mortifying, explosive noises my body made. This hadn’t yet changed. I had fewer bowel movements than before, but they were still urgent and explosive and often bloody. I didn’t want anyone to hear me who knew me, or to whom I had explained my disease. Oh, that must be the gal with the colitis, they would think from the next stall. Poor thing.
Conference events would last five to six hours each day. The first morning, to my relief, I did find an out-of-the-way bathroom and quickly learned which times I was most likely to be alone there. As the day wore on, my body seemed to cooperate: I was going for longer periods without a bathroom than I often went at home. My stomach also granted me more time between the bouts of sudden ravenousness that often overcame me on this diet.
I suspected adrenaline was a factor in these changes. I felt buoyed by the excitement of being social and learning about my craft, and bt thinking in depth about something other than colitis for the first time in months.
At lunch, I sat with a newfound friend from my main class, a “master’s” class for people who had finished a book draft. I briefly explained to my new friend that I had “a GI issue” that I was “trying to self-cure” through diet.
She made a frowny face in sympathy. Then she shrugged, and she didn’t even glance at my Pyrex containers as I spooned my grape Jello and cheesecake into my mouth. No one else at the table seemed to notice my strange food, either. While it was always painfully obvious to me that I was the odd one out, my oddity seemed almost invisible to others who ate normally.
Today I was grateful for that invisibility. What a relief! I could pass for a normal member of society, at least for short periods.
As the week went on, I felt more and more relaxed, calm, and in synch. For the first time in several months, nearly everything felt right in my world. I was becoming a writer, one of my life dreams. I was getting good feedback from my teacher and fellow students. I was the author of a memoir that others found powerful. I was a supportive, helpful presence in class. I was a young person with happy energy. I was not the girl with colitis.
Midway through the week, a storm shook Madison the likes of which I’d never seen. It tore the roof off the boathouse next door, flung that roof up, and slammed it into the base of the window just below my writing desk. Ron and I were in bed in the next room, and we awoke to an explosion of bricks and shattered glass, tornado sirens, and hurricane-force winds.
But no one was hurt, and in class the next morning I had a great story to tell, and I wrote about it all on my writing blog. The storm felt symbolic to me. It was time to leave Madison. Time to wrap up this writing project, this phase of things, and move ahead with our lives.
I hoped I could somehow wrap up my colitis, as well.
At the end of the week, I bade my classmates farewell, satisfied and glowing with happiness. The week’s focus on writing, the positive feedback, and my increased energy all served to restore a sense of wellbeing to my shaken world. I’d been knocked down by my disease, but I was picking myself back up again.
