Just a little help

February 26, 2009

I finished my 5 day course of Cipro last night. We also got a call back from Dr. T's office yesterday afternoon. She said apparently the biopsy results showed that I have cryptitis (inflammation) in my rectum and no pouchitis. I'm supposed to go back to doing the ever-so-lovely nightly enemas of anti-inflammatory medication to treat it. Okay. I've got that routine down pat by now. Can I just also say right now how thankful I am for health insurance? A month's worth of the enemas cost us $360 (before we met our deductible - now they are covered 100%)! There are just so many jokes I could make about enemas, I think I better stop now and let your imagination fill in the rest.

I've been feeling better this week than I did last week, so that's good. Not as good as I was the week before that, but that's okay. At least I know "better" is out there and attainable (right Dad?).

I met with Dr. N for counseling again tonight. It went so well. When I started the session I was feeling so depressed and just tired of it all - like somehow I was going to convince him that yes, I have in fact had enough and it would be okay for me to kill myself. We talked about a range of different topics; work, body image, sex, pain, healing, etc. He challenged my thinking on each of the different issues. "What if instead of telling yourself _____________ you told yourself _____________ about your body (or about beauty or about whatever else I've been a little messed up on)?" By the end of the session I was talking about the freedom I'm starting to experience emotionally through all of this; like I don't have to hide what I'm feeling. I've earned the right to feel whatever I feel and I'm feeling more authentic as a result. Everything was falling together in my mind as I spoke to him and I felt this surge of energy.

"What are you feeling right now?" he asked.

"I'm feeling energized," I responded quickly. Being the good therapist that he is, he asked if that was different than what I was feeling when I started the session. It absolutely was. I started the session barely having the emotional energy to tell him how my week had been. We then talked through what had made the difference in my mood. And of course, much of it was how I interpreted my feelings (both physical and emotional).

I knew what he was doing - cognitive behavioral therapy. In fact, at one point he was talking through a process that I had typed up and handed out to my "Coping Skills Group" as homework. I wanted to laugh, but I didn't because I didn't want to take up my precious 50 minutes by talking about how I knew what theory he was using. It makes me laugh too because how often do we know what it is that we need to do to feel better, we just need a little help getting there?