***Warning: Excessively long post to follow. I haven't talked to a whole lot of people about all this and I guess I had quite a bit to say...
Hello everybody. My name is Josiah, and I'm nineteen years old. As the title of this thread suggests, I'm going to see a GI doctor about a potential case of Crohn's tomorrow morning. It's been a long journey to this point (albeit, not nearly as long as some of the incredibly unfortunate but impressively resilient folks' stories I've come across on here). I discovered these forums and read a few personal stories over the weekend. I now feel compelled to share my own. I welcome any feedback (including grammatical corrections if that's your thing) in response.
I led an uncommonly healthy and happy childhood. I hadn't been struck with so much as a cavity from birth to the eighteenth year of my life. That said, I trace the beginning of my potential Crohn's story back to the start of the eighteenth year of my life in January of 2015, when I started to experience an uptick in general anxiety. I was in challenging high school courses and threw myself into the college application process/preparing myself for the next phase of my life, so I wasn't exactly worried about what I was feeling, as it seemed situational and I expected it to dissipate when things settled down. The anxiety persisted through the semester with the continued presence of reasonable triggers, and though it didn't worry me, I began to become increasingly serious and occasionally irritable. I lost my appetite and often feel fatigued. In the final months of my semester, I experienced a period in which I was urinating frequently, going after every class and waking up most every night to relieve myself. I went to my doctor about the frequent urination and he prescribed me some antibiotics, which seemed to tame but not eliminate the annoyance. I had lost a significant amount of weight by the time the semester was through, and while I hadn't been compelled to eat as much as I once did, I felt I'd lost an unreasonable amount of weight considering what I continued to consume.
I don't remember experiencing a whole lot of gastrointestinal anomalies during my second semester, and it wasn't until the summer that I noticed a slight increase in the frequency of and urgency associated with my bowel movements. The anxiety and everything else had persisted into the summer despite the end of my courses. Things had settled down significantly, but I still had some reasonable stressors I could tie my symptoms to. For example, I was planning a large thru-hike with minimal backpacking experience, training for my first marathon, and keeping myself busy with a part time job, some heavy reading, etc.
I carried on throughout the summer and experienced incredibly satisfying successes in some of these endeavors despite what I was feeling. This may have been enough to distract me from some of my body's red flags, but looking back on this time I realize I wasn't healthy. I'm 6'2", and at my lightest I weighed in at 136 pounds. While I'd been tall and wiry growing up, this seemed a tad unreasonable, and looking back at pictures I can hardly believe how thin I'd become. At a certain point my appetite began to increase. I ate much more than I had been in prior months, and eventually much more than I felt I ever had, but I remained disturbingly skinny. Looking back at other pictures, I've also noticed my skin was extremely orange for a while, and loved ones have recently mentioned noticing yellow splotches appear on my body at times.
Yet, as I previously mentioned, I was having far too much fun to take note of much of this myself at the time. The climax of my summer was embarking on the hike I'd been planning with my two best friends. We spent nearly a month in the wilderness thousands of miles away from home with nothing but our large backpacks and their contents. Our trip went without a hitch, and I saw incredibly beautiful things I won't ever forget. Any anxiety I'd been experiencing prior to our departure disappeared within the first few hours on the train to our trailhead. While I wonder how I carried so much weight on my back so far with my slight frame at the time now, I felt very well for the entirety of the trip and never struggled with anything more severe than an itchy mosquito bite.
We got home from our trip with a few weeks before we all went off to college. In the days immediately following our return I ate a lot of cereal (a favorite we hadn't enjoyed on the trail) and started running again. I felt like I was in incredible shape despite not having run for a month and enjoyed being back out on the streets again, but on my second run back I remember feeling a sharp cramp in my abdomen. I didn't think much of it until two days later when I was mentioning it to an ER doctor and experiencing the most intense physical pain I'd ever felt.
It was hardly four days after I'd gotten back when I started to feel sick to my stomach in the evening. I'd felt fine all morning and afternoon. I'd gotten a good run in with my older sister and encouraged her to sign up for a race I intended to run in the coming weeks. But that evening while I sat at my computer in my room I began to feel nauseous and bloated. I told my mom I didn't feel well when she called me for dinner and laid down to sleep it off. I laid in bed for an hour as the discomfort turned to pain, and my parents were at my bedside after I started groaning. The pain quickly escalated, and after a short discussion and shorter car ride, I was admitted to the ER. The pain was so intense by the time I arrived they took me to a room without much of an evaluation and shot me up with morphine. The only memories I have of the rest of the night are of thrashing in bed when the drugs would wear off and being evaluated by some doctors/run through some imaging machines. In the morning, the docs came back to tell me I'd had a small bowel obstruction and that they'd never seen anything so severe happen to anyone under ninety. Fortunately, their initial treatments were enough to right the problem, and surgery wasn't necessary.
As soon as I was feeling well and able to think of anything but how happy I was not to feel like somebody was cutting me open from the inside, all I wanted to do was get out of the hospital and put the incident behind me. I wasn't extremely interested in what had caused the obstruction, and the doctors' best explanation was that I'd probably gotten dehydrated out on the trail and my body didn't have enough fluid to digest properly, causing a coincidental blockage. After visiting my family doctor for a follow up my own doctor brushed it off as a freak accident and told me I shouldn't think much of it. He told me I could start running and get back to my life as soon as I felt my body telling me I was ready.
I took that as a green light and dove right back into the fast paced life I'd been living. Not a week after the whole debacle I moved into the dorms at school. It was easy for me to forget about my unhappy experience in the hospital here, as I was in a completely new environment, meeting an excess of new people, and as excited as anyone could possibly be to dive right into my courses and everything else the university had to offer. I was a ball of human energy for the next three months. I attacked my studies, I found a couple amazing guys to run with, and I attended every obscure club meeting/welcome event that cater to freshman during those first few months of college. Two weeks after I'd been in the hospital I signed up for a marathon on a whim and ran it without telling anybody. My dad called me the day after asking me about it because I'd placed and he happened to glance at the results in the paper. One week I applied to attend a high-profile investing conference on a whim and was invited to attend the day before it took place. I flew to New York on twelve hour's notice, seamlessly navigated my way around the city, and spent the day listening to the advise of the world's top investors.
I was happier and felt more alive than I'd ever been before. Looking back on this time, I realize this may have done much to distract me from some post-hospital GI issues I was experiencing. I was passing stool much more often than I had it the past, and the bulk of it was much looser than I was accustomed to. Often, I noticed bright red spots of blood on the toilet paper when my back door was clear of other debris, but I figured the increased frequency of my going and consequent increased frequency in wiping had just caused some irritation or something. I started to have very bad, very persistent gas, sometimes so intense that it kept me up while I tried to sleep at night. My stomach would grow especially unhappy on runs.
Life went on like this until Thanksgiving break, when my sister was diagnosed with Ulcerative Colitis. She had been through a gruesome experience of her own reaching this diagnosis, and myself along with my entire family was shaken by this unfortunate development in her health. I was especially bothered by her diagnosis, and while I've always been very close to my sister, my concern seemed to extend beyond our familial bond. Looking back, I wonder if this was perhaps some subconscious acknowledgement of what I'd been going through, but at the time it only presented itself as a return of some of the anxiety I'd been feeling. I finished out the semester strong despite this distraction and continued to feel extremely well much more than I felt anxious.
And then I went home for Christmas break. The first week was productive and invigorating. I had projects to pursue, holiday activities to enjoy, and plenty to distract me from any gas, anxiety, etc. Yet, as the three week break stretched on, things began to slow down. I began to find myself wondering what to do with all the downtime that had suddenly been dumped on me. And then it was almost like a flip was switched. All the sudden I felt more anxious than I'd ever been. I literally felt week in my knees, and it seemed all the coping mechanisms I'd learned to use to combat common worry and stress were useless against this extremely intense anxiety. I constantly felt on edge. I began to have a lot of trouble sleeping, and for the next two weeks at home I was quite miserable.
Despite the intensity of what I was feeling, I still felt I was able to point to some triggers, and after talking with some loved ones, I felt I had a pretty good handle on what was going on. I expected I'd feel better once I returned to school and got back in the fast lane/usual routine, but unfortunately this was not the case. The second day of my second semester I had a panic attack. I called my parents who picked me up (they live a couple miles from my university) and brought me home to try to figure out what I needed to do. We decided I was simply stressing over my courses that semester, and after a meeting with my advisor and a lighter load than I'd initially enrolled in, I felt I'd solved the problem.
Yet, my anxiety not only persisted, but it gradually intensified, and each time I would find something different to attribute it to. After calling my mom on the verge of tears in the midst of a panic attack, I'd calm down and attribute it to some apparently unresolved incident from my past or something I had approaching on the horizon. I began to get less and less sleep and turned to anything I hoped might provide one full night's rest. Some things I tried were silly, like the essential oils my mom told me to rub on my temples, and others were simply extremely out of character for me. I'd never been quick to medicate and even resisted taking so much as an ibuprofen growing up, but I began to turn to over the counter sleep aids in an attempt to rest. When melatonin didn't work I turned to antihistamines. When I still failed to sleep through the night, I accepted some more targeted concoctions my parents handed to me. These provided a manufactured sleep, leaving me feeling more sedated than rested when I woke in the morning, and they eventually stopped working all together. After about a month since the intense anxiety began, I was at a loss, and for the first time in a long time I felt like I didn't have a handle on what was going on around me/inside me. The simplest things would send me into a frenzy. Sometimes I'd tense up for no reason and duck into a study room to call my folks in hope of relief. None of it made any sense. I had good friends at school, I was extremely content in my program and exceling in my classes. Though the gas and seemingly minor GI symptoms persisted, I was much more focused on trying to get a good night's rest and solve the anxiety puzzle that had presented itself to pay attention to them. I started to reach out to advisors at school and was directed to the campus counseling center, where I spoke with a therapist more than once and tried to figure out why this was happening and what I needed to do about it.
Another month passed. I'd have periods when I thought I'd conquered the anxiety only to be thrown back into an even hotter fire. I was spending more and more time at home and away from the campus/community I'd fallen in love with for a temporary sense of relief, though I never really felt free of the struggle when I hid from it in this way. But after another month, things simply boiled over. We went to our family doctor about the anxiety. They did some blood tests to check for a thyroid condition and anemia, but these came back unremarkable, save the fact I was slightly anemic. They told me to eat more spinach and keep running. Two days later we were back in the office. The anxiety intensified despite everyone (myself included) telling me it was only in my head, and I'd begun to behave erratically. My doctor gave me some Xanax and referred us to a psychiatrist, who listened to me for several minutes and threw me a couple of bottles of pills that were supposed to help me sleep. I was beyond hesitating to take medication at this point, as I was hardly acting myself in any other regard and hadn't slept properly in so long taking the medication seemed to be the only valid response to being given it. My parents, who would typically think twice about such a decision as well, were losing sleep worrying over me at this point, and their critical thinking skills weren't much better than mine as a result.
So I took these medications, all within a very short period of time, and I woke up one morning feeling completely flat. Such a feeling is very hard to describe, and it was even harder to experience. I was void of any emotion. I felt removed from myself and my immediate surroundings, and I proceeded to behave in very uncharacteristic, worrisome ways. After much unproductive talk and no signs of improvement, my parents brought me back to the hospital for the second time in my life, except this time I was admitted to the psych ward.
To be fair, I consented to going. I sat in a room with a case worker who assessed me and had me sign a paper admitting me to the unit. Yet, I don't feel I really comprehended the consequences of doing so at the time. I spent four days there, and I'll refrain from describing them in detail as I don't exactly want to relive them. I've always been one who feels intensely, who picks up energy in others and is affected by it, and as flat as I felt during my second stay at the hospital, I still wonder how I functioned at all in such an environment. I'd often feel anxious about those around me and being in the place I was in general. Completely cut off from any other coping mechanism I might have used outside the unit, I would call my parents and eat instead.
We later learned that a side effect of some of the medications I'd been given was sugar cravings. I consumed ungodly amounts of sugar during my stay at the hospital, and even after the medication wore off (it apparently took about a week), I craved and ate a lot of sugar, which was extremely uncharacteristic of me as well. I gained a startling amount of wait in a very short span of time. I only mention this whole bit because my diet changed suddenly and significantly, and as a result I temporarily ceased to experience significant gas and GI problems, though I didn't note it at the time. I suppose it makes sense, as many refined/processed/sugar laden foods are easier to digest than the whole, plant-based foods I typically eat.
Anyway, I got out of the hospital and back to school. I was still doing well and hardly behind, but life was not exactly projected to settle down. I'd enrolled in a spring break study abroad experience months before I'd started to experience some of these complications and was scheduled to be in Uganda one week after I was discharged from the hospital. I was cleared to go by doctors there and I would've been extremely disappointed to stay behind. Still, I was a nervous wreck as my parents drove me to the airport, and the week proved to be a rough one.
I was completely out of sorts in an environment in which I'd typically thrive. At a conference we attended that focused on subject matter extremely pertinent to my field of interest, I could hardly pay attention or carry a conversation. A normally confident and comfortable speaker, when it was my turn to present I faired miserably, staring out at the audience with what I know was a look of absolute terror and even dropping the microphone at one point. Yet, as the week progressed I began to experience more than anxiety. It started on another restless night, except this time I not only lay there frustrated but started to sweat profusely and feel generally unwell. I woke up in the morning in a fog, and for the rest of the day I could hardly function, sleeping at every opportunity. The next morning I was nauseous at the thought of eating, and I laid in bed, unable to participate in the day's activities. I started to have diarrhea and felt increasingly dehydrated. I really figured I'd just picked up some nasty bug like one might traveling in a country like Uganda, but whatever was ailing me seemed to be unresponsive to medications that were aiding other students in managing their travel sickness, and as theirs seemed generally resolved by the time we started home, I only felt sicker. Going through security at the airport was a challenge, and there were times on our return trip that I had this sudden, sinking feeling that I wasn't going to make it home. I passed some very troublesome stool on the plane, not just diarrhea but once a pure black, tar-like substance, another had blood, and others had other anomalies I was initially troubled by but didn't really take note of at the time because I was feeling so miserable and can't quite remember vividly now.
I went right back to the dorm and school within hours of getting off the plane, but I was back at home within days, anxious, jetlagged, still sick and feeling betrayed by my own body on multiple fronts. I tried to go to classes a couple times, but even walking the campus in such a state paralyzed me. Everything around me felt dangerous. I just couldn't think straight. I tried another psychological medication they prescribed at the hospital for a short time but stopped taking it for reasons similar to those I'd stopped taking the others I was encouraged to consider taking the rest of the semester off by university administration and the counseling center if I thought that would help me recover. After much discussion with my parents and the my best attempt to think rationally about the option, I pulled out of classes I'd typically enjoy and attack, with grades on paper that made doing so at the time seem ludicrous.
And then I entered a period of depression. Completely cut off from the environment I loved and flourished in, I felt really awful. At a certain point, the worst of the GI issues had resolved themselves but I hardly noticed. I just felt absolutely terrible about myself and everything that had happened. I started intense therapy, as the problem was still assumed to be entirely in my head, but I continued to feel extremely low and anxious about the silliest things. A couple weeks passed this way before I was watching a documentary on the Kennedy's with my family which detailed JFK's struggle with Addison's disease, an autoimmune disease which targets the adrenal glands. My sister, who's currently in medical school, pointed out much of what I'd gone through could be caused by Addison's disease. The fact that my mother and my sister both had autoimmune diseases made the possibility more compelling. In the coming days my parents and I looked into it further and decided to go to my doctor for more complete bloodwork than they had done before, and I learned that autoimmune diseases are not only common in my immediate family but extremely prevalent on my mom's side of the family.
This next round of blood tests revealed I was still anemic and there was some sort of inflammation somewhere in my body. They did further testing to rule out Addison's, suggested we make an appointment with a GI doctor, and waited two weeks to do another comprehensive test to see the direction everything was going. In two weeks the tests showed that the inflammation had gone done but was still present, but the more significant concern was that my liver enzymes had shot up. They ruled out a few more things, and after they did we were to wait until the appointment with the GI doctor months from now. I'd have ups and downs, but I continued to feel predominantly depressed throughout all this, and the prospect of waiting so long to get in with a GI doc didn't exactly perk me up.
And then, this last week, my mom got a call from the GI office informing her there had been a cancelation and we could get in the following week. I was scheduled to get in for a consultation tomorrow. And so I guess that reaches the end of my story as it has unfolded thus far and the end of what has probably been the most ridiculously long-winded thread on this forum to date. I just have a few more things to say before I make it any longer. I don't hope to be told I have a chronic disease. If I do, I hope it's diagnosed soon and treated appropriately. What I really want most is to get back to my life. But right now, what I want even more is to sincerely thank anyone who had the endurance to read even half of this thread and anyone who has anything to say in response to it.
Thank you,
Josiah
Hello everybody. My name is Josiah, and I'm nineteen years old. As the title of this thread suggests, I'm going to see a GI doctor about a potential case of Crohn's tomorrow morning. It's been a long journey to this point (albeit, not nearly as long as some of the incredibly unfortunate but impressively resilient folks' stories I've come across on here). I discovered these forums and read a few personal stories over the weekend. I now feel compelled to share my own. I welcome any feedback (including grammatical corrections if that's your thing) in response.
I led an uncommonly healthy and happy childhood. I hadn't been struck with so much as a cavity from birth to the eighteenth year of my life. That said, I trace the beginning of my potential Crohn's story back to the start of the eighteenth year of my life in January of 2015, when I started to experience an uptick in general anxiety. I was in challenging high school courses and threw myself into the college application process/preparing myself for the next phase of my life, so I wasn't exactly worried about what I was feeling, as it seemed situational and I expected it to dissipate when things settled down. The anxiety persisted through the semester with the continued presence of reasonable triggers, and though it didn't worry me, I began to become increasingly serious and occasionally irritable. I lost my appetite and often feel fatigued. In the final months of my semester, I experienced a period in which I was urinating frequently, going after every class and waking up most every night to relieve myself. I went to my doctor about the frequent urination and he prescribed me some antibiotics, which seemed to tame but not eliminate the annoyance. I had lost a significant amount of weight by the time the semester was through, and while I hadn't been compelled to eat as much as I once did, I felt I'd lost an unreasonable amount of weight considering what I continued to consume.
I don't remember experiencing a whole lot of gastrointestinal anomalies during my second semester, and it wasn't until the summer that I noticed a slight increase in the frequency of and urgency associated with my bowel movements. The anxiety and everything else had persisted into the summer despite the end of my courses. Things had settled down significantly, but I still had some reasonable stressors I could tie my symptoms to. For example, I was planning a large thru-hike with minimal backpacking experience, training for my first marathon, and keeping myself busy with a part time job, some heavy reading, etc.
I carried on throughout the summer and experienced incredibly satisfying successes in some of these endeavors despite what I was feeling. This may have been enough to distract me from some of my body's red flags, but looking back on this time I realize I wasn't healthy. I'm 6'2", and at my lightest I weighed in at 136 pounds. While I'd been tall and wiry growing up, this seemed a tad unreasonable, and looking back at pictures I can hardly believe how thin I'd become. At a certain point my appetite began to increase. I ate much more than I had been in prior months, and eventually much more than I felt I ever had, but I remained disturbingly skinny. Looking back at other pictures, I've also noticed my skin was extremely orange for a while, and loved ones have recently mentioned noticing yellow splotches appear on my body at times.
Yet, as I previously mentioned, I was having far too much fun to take note of much of this myself at the time. The climax of my summer was embarking on the hike I'd been planning with my two best friends. We spent nearly a month in the wilderness thousands of miles away from home with nothing but our large backpacks and their contents. Our trip went without a hitch, and I saw incredibly beautiful things I won't ever forget. Any anxiety I'd been experiencing prior to our departure disappeared within the first few hours on the train to our trailhead. While I wonder how I carried so much weight on my back so far with my slight frame at the time now, I felt very well for the entirety of the trip and never struggled with anything more severe than an itchy mosquito bite.
We got home from our trip with a few weeks before we all went off to college. In the days immediately following our return I ate a lot of cereal (a favorite we hadn't enjoyed on the trail) and started running again. I felt like I was in incredible shape despite not having run for a month and enjoyed being back out on the streets again, but on my second run back I remember feeling a sharp cramp in my abdomen. I didn't think much of it until two days later when I was mentioning it to an ER doctor and experiencing the most intense physical pain I'd ever felt.
It was hardly four days after I'd gotten back when I started to feel sick to my stomach in the evening. I'd felt fine all morning and afternoon. I'd gotten a good run in with my older sister and encouraged her to sign up for a race I intended to run in the coming weeks. But that evening while I sat at my computer in my room I began to feel nauseous and bloated. I told my mom I didn't feel well when she called me for dinner and laid down to sleep it off. I laid in bed for an hour as the discomfort turned to pain, and my parents were at my bedside after I started groaning. The pain quickly escalated, and after a short discussion and shorter car ride, I was admitted to the ER. The pain was so intense by the time I arrived they took me to a room without much of an evaluation and shot me up with morphine. The only memories I have of the rest of the night are of thrashing in bed when the drugs would wear off and being evaluated by some doctors/run through some imaging machines. In the morning, the docs came back to tell me I'd had a small bowel obstruction and that they'd never seen anything so severe happen to anyone under ninety. Fortunately, their initial treatments were enough to right the problem, and surgery wasn't necessary.
As soon as I was feeling well and able to think of anything but how happy I was not to feel like somebody was cutting me open from the inside, all I wanted to do was get out of the hospital and put the incident behind me. I wasn't extremely interested in what had caused the obstruction, and the doctors' best explanation was that I'd probably gotten dehydrated out on the trail and my body didn't have enough fluid to digest properly, causing a coincidental blockage. After visiting my family doctor for a follow up my own doctor brushed it off as a freak accident and told me I shouldn't think much of it. He told me I could start running and get back to my life as soon as I felt my body telling me I was ready.
I took that as a green light and dove right back into the fast paced life I'd been living. Not a week after the whole debacle I moved into the dorms at school. It was easy for me to forget about my unhappy experience in the hospital here, as I was in a completely new environment, meeting an excess of new people, and as excited as anyone could possibly be to dive right into my courses and everything else the university had to offer. I was a ball of human energy for the next three months. I attacked my studies, I found a couple amazing guys to run with, and I attended every obscure club meeting/welcome event that cater to freshman during those first few months of college. Two weeks after I'd been in the hospital I signed up for a marathon on a whim and ran it without telling anybody. My dad called me the day after asking me about it because I'd placed and he happened to glance at the results in the paper. One week I applied to attend a high-profile investing conference on a whim and was invited to attend the day before it took place. I flew to New York on twelve hour's notice, seamlessly navigated my way around the city, and spent the day listening to the advise of the world's top investors.
I was happier and felt more alive than I'd ever been before. Looking back on this time, I realize this may have done much to distract me from some post-hospital GI issues I was experiencing. I was passing stool much more often than I had it the past, and the bulk of it was much looser than I was accustomed to. Often, I noticed bright red spots of blood on the toilet paper when my back door was clear of other debris, but I figured the increased frequency of my going and consequent increased frequency in wiping had just caused some irritation or something. I started to have very bad, very persistent gas, sometimes so intense that it kept me up while I tried to sleep at night. My stomach would grow especially unhappy on runs.
Life went on like this until Thanksgiving break, when my sister was diagnosed with Ulcerative Colitis. She had been through a gruesome experience of her own reaching this diagnosis, and myself along with my entire family was shaken by this unfortunate development in her health. I was especially bothered by her diagnosis, and while I've always been very close to my sister, my concern seemed to extend beyond our familial bond. Looking back, I wonder if this was perhaps some subconscious acknowledgement of what I'd been going through, but at the time it only presented itself as a return of some of the anxiety I'd been feeling. I finished out the semester strong despite this distraction and continued to feel extremely well much more than I felt anxious.
And then I went home for Christmas break. The first week was productive and invigorating. I had projects to pursue, holiday activities to enjoy, and plenty to distract me from any gas, anxiety, etc. Yet, as the three week break stretched on, things began to slow down. I began to find myself wondering what to do with all the downtime that had suddenly been dumped on me. And then it was almost like a flip was switched. All the sudden I felt more anxious than I'd ever been. I literally felt week in my knees, and it seemed all the coping mechanisms I'd learned to use to combat common worry and stress were useless against this extremely intense anxiety. I constantly felt on edge. I began to have a lot of trouble sleeping, and for the next two weeks at home I was quite miserable.
Despite the intensity of what I was feeling, I still felt I was able to point to some triggers, and after talking with some loved ones, I felt I had a pretty good handle on what was going on. I expected I'd feel better once I returned to school and got back in the fast lane/usual routine, but unfortunately this was not the case. The second day of my second semester I had a panic attack. I called my parents who picked me up (they live a couple miles from my university) and brought me home to try to figure out what I needed to do. We decided I was simply stressing over my courses that semester, and after a meeting with my advisor and a lighter load than I'd initially enrolled in, I felt I'd solved the problem.
Yet, my anxiety not only persisted, but it gradually intensified, and each time I would find something different to attribute it to. After calling my mom on the verge of tears in the midst of a panic attack, I'd calm down and attribute it to some apparently unresolved incident from my past or something I had approaching on the horizon. I began to get less and less sleep and turned to anything I hoped might provide one full night's rest. Some things I tried were silly, like the essential oils my mom told me to rub on my temples, and others were simply extremely out of character for me. I'd never been quick to medicate and even resisted taking so much as an ibuprofen growing up, but I began to turn to over the counter sleep aids in an attempt to rest. When melatonin didn't work I turned to antihistamines. When I still failed to sleep through the night, I accepted some more targeted concoctions my parents handed to me. These provided a manufactured sleep, leaving me feeling more sedated than rested when I woke in the morning, and they eventually stopped working all together. After about a month since the intense anxiety began, I was at a loss, and for the first time in a long time I felt like I didn't have a handle on what was going on around me/inside me. The simplest things would send me into a frenzy. Sometimes I'd tense up for no reason and duck into a study room to call my folks in hope of relief. None of it made any sense. I had good friends at school, I was extremely content in my program and exceling in my classes. Though the gas and seemingly minor GI symptoms persisted, I was much more focused on trying to get a good night's rest and solve the anxiety puzzle that had presented itself to pay attention to them. I started to reach out to advisors at school and was directed to the campus counseling center, where I spoke with a therapist more than once and tried to figure out why this was happening and what I needed to do about it.
Another month passed. I'd have periods when I thought I'd conquered the anxiety only to be thrown back into an even hotter fire. I was spending more and more time at home and away from the campus/community I'd fallen in love with for a temporary sense of relief, though I never really felt free of the struggle when I hid from it in this way. But after another month, things simply boiled over. We went to our family doctor about the anxiety. They did some blood tests to check for a thyroid condition and anemia, but these came back unremarkable, save the fact I was slightly anemic. They told me to eat more spinach and keep running. Two days later we were back in the office. The anxiety intensified despite everyone (myself included) telling me it was only in my head, and I'd begun to behave erratically. My doctor gave me some Xanax and referred us to a psychiatrist, who listened to me for several minutes and threw me a couple of bottles of pills that were supposed to help me sleep. I was beyond hesitating to take medication at this point, as I was hardly acting myself in any other regard and hadn't slept properly in so long taking the medication seemed to be the only valid response to being given it. My parents, who would typically think twice about such a decision as well, were losing sleep worrying over me at this point, and their critical thinking skills weren't much better than mine as a result.
So I took these medications, all within a very short period of time, and I woke up one morning feeling completely flat. Such a feeling is very hard to describe, and it was even harder to experience. I was void of any emotion. I felt removed from myself and my immediate surroundings, and I proceeded to behave in very uncharacteristic, worrisome ways. After much unproductive talk and no signs of improvement, my parents brought me back to the hospital for the second time in my life, except this time I was admitted to the psych ward.
To be fair, I consented to going. I sat in a room with a case worker who assessed me and had me sign a paper admitting me to the unit. Yet, I don't feel I really comprehended the consequences of doing so at the time. I spent four days there, and I'll refrain from describing them in detail as I don't exactly want to relive them. I've always been one who feels intensely, who picks up energy in others and is affected by it, and as flat as I felt during my second stay at the hospital, I still wonder how I functioned at all in such an environment. I'd often feel anxious about those around me and being in the place I was in general. Completely cut off from any other coping mechanism I might have used outside the unit, I would call my parents and eat instead.
We later learned that a side effect of some of the medications I'd been given was sugar cravings. I consumed ungodly amounts of sugar during my stay at the hospital, and even after the medication wore off (it apparently took about a week), I craved and ate a lot of sugar, which was extremely uncharacteristic of me as well. I gained a startling amount of wait in a very short span of time. I only mention this whole bit because my diet changed suddenly and significantly, and as a result I temporarily ceased to experience significant gas and GI problems, though I didn't note it at the time. I suppose it makes sense, as many refined/processed/sugar laden foods are easier to digest than the whole, plant-based foods I typically eat.
Anyway, I got out of the hospital and back to school. I was still doing well and hardly behind, but life was not exactly projected to settle down. I'd enrolled in a spring break study abroad experience months before I'd started to experience some of these complications and was scheduled to be in Uganda one week after I was discharged from the hospital. I was cleared to go by doctors there and I would've been extremely disappointed to stay behind. Still, I was a nervous wreck as my parents drove me to the airport, and the week proved to be a rough one.
I was completely out of sorts in an environment in which I'd typically thrive. At a conference we attended that focused on subject matter extremely pertinent to my field of interest, I could hardly pay attention or carry a conversation. A normally confident and comfortable speaker, when it was my turn to present I faired miserably, staring out at the audience with what I know was a look of absolute terror and even dropping the microphone at one point. Yet, as the week progressed I began to experience more than anxiety. It started on another restless night, except this time I not only lay there frustrated but started to sweat profusely and feel generally unwell. I woke up in the morning in a fog, and for the rest of the day I could hardly function, sleeping at every opportunity. The next morning I was nauseous at the thought of eating, and I laid in bed, unable to participate in the day's activities. I started to have diarrhea and felt increasingly dehydrated. I really figured I'd just picked up some nasty bug like one might traveling in a country like Uganda, but whatever was ailing me seemed to be unresponsive to medications that were aiding other students in managing their travel sickness, and as theirs seemed generally resolved by the time we started home, I only felt sicker. Going through security at the airport was a challenge, and there were times on our return trip that I had this sudden, sinking feeling that I wasn't going to make it home. I passed some very troublesome stool on the plane, not just diarrhea but once a pure black, tar-like substance, another had blood, and others had other anomalies I was initially troubled by but didn't really take note of at the time because I was feeling so miserable and can't quite remember vividly now.
I went right back to the dorm and school within hours of getting off the plane, but I was back at home within days, anxious, jetlagged, still sick and feeling betrayed by my own body on multiple fronts. I tried to go to classes a couple times, but even walking the campus in such a state paralyzed me. Everything around me felt dangerous. I just couldn't think straight. I tried another psychological medication they prescribed at the hospital for a short time but stopped taking it for reasons similar to those I'd stopped taking the others I was encouraged to consider taking the rest of the semester off by university administration and the counseling center if I thought that would help me recover. After much discussion with my parents and the my best attempt to think rationally about the option, I pulled out of classes I'd typically enjoy and attack, with grades on paper that made doing so at the time seem ludicrous.
And then I entered a period of depression. Completely cut off from the environment I loved and flourished in, I felt really awful. At a certain point, the worst of the GI issues had resolved themselves but I hardly noticed. I just felt absolutely terrible about myself and everything that had happened. I started intense therapy, as the problem was still assumed to be entirely in my head, but I continued to feel extremely low and anxious about the silliest things. A couple weeks passed this way before I was watching a documentary on the Kennedy's with my family which detailed JFK's struggle with Addison's disease, an autoimmune disease which targets the adrenal glands. My sister, who's currently in medical school, pointed out much of what I'd gone through could be caused by Addison's disease. The fact that my mother and my sister both had autoimmune diseases made the possibility more compelling. In the coming days my parents and I looked into it further and decided to go to my doctor for more complete bloodwork than they had done before, and I learned that autoimmune diseases are not only common in my immediate family but extremely prevalent on my mom's side of the family.
This next round of blood tests revealed I was still anemic and there was some sort of inflammation somewhere in my body. They did further testing to rule out Addison's, suggested we make an appointment with a GI doctor, and waited two weeks to do another comprehensive test to see the direction everything was going. In two weeks the tests showed that the inflammation had gone done but was still present, but the more significant concern was that my liver enzymes had shot up. They ruled out a few more things, and after they did we were to wait until the appointment with the GI doctor months from now. I'd have ups and downs, but I continued to feel predominantly depressed throughout all this, and the prospect of waiting so long to get in with a GI doc didn't exactly perk me up.
And then, this last week, my mom got a call from the GI office informing her there had been a cancelation and we could get in the following week. I was scheduled to get in for a consultation tomorrow. And so I guess that reaches the end of my story as it has unfolded thus far and the end of what has probably been the most ridiculously long-winded thread on this forum to date. I just have a few more things to say before I make it any longer. I don't hope to be told I have a chronic disease. If I do, I hope it's diagnosed soon and treated appropriately. What I really want most is to get back to my life. But right now, what I want even more is to sincerely thank anyone who had the endurance to read even half of this thread and anyone who has anything to say in response to it.
Thank you,
Josiah
