Wednesday's diary on a Thursday 0.7

Me and my UC are going to Italy for a couple of weeks. It’ll be our first proper holiday away together. Aaaah, how romantic. And just in the nick of time everything seems to be calming down. So as this will be my last post for a while, I’ll leave you with this.

Wednesday 30th August:
6.35am Loose stool

Medication:
6 x Mesalazine 400mg
4 x Prednisolone 5mg
3 x Ferrous Sulphate 200mg
2 x Calcium Carb 1.25g

Comments:
Stopped taking the foam enema completely after I forgot to take it one night and discovered it felt better without. Fingers crossed I'm doing the right thing. Hardly any stomach pains now, but I can still feel it's 'there'. But by far and a long way the best I've felt in months.

The Hell Drug! Smile! Cheese!

This video blog by an ulcerative colitis sufferer made me laugh. I had no idea UC could give you verbal diarrhoea too. Bless her for sharing her experiences, though, and she did manage to bring a smile to my cynical old face. If this is her on the Hell Drug imagine what she’s like when she’s feeling well. Frightening.

It was the dog, I swear

I sometimes feel a little shy on zebra crossings. I don’t like the drivers peering out at me. I feel exposed and I don’t like the attention. Yet here I am, this supposedly shy person, writing about my poo on the internet. Not exactly the actions of a chronic introvert, I agree. But when I started this blog I made a promise to be honest. To tell it like it is, no matter how embarrassing. So it brings me no pleasure whatsoever to announce that for the first time in a very long while, I can fart again. This is of course a good thing. Unless you happen to be in the room with me, in which case it’s more of an eye-watering thing. Up until the last few days passing wind would have meant a change of underwear (sheesh, now I really am airing my dirty laundry in public). But oh, what a blessed relief it is to trump without fear of touching cloth. Now when I let one go I don’t let anything go with it. My guffs are gaseous, dry as a bone. I think this is a positive development and a sign that things might be getting back to normal down below. There is a wind of change blowing in my bowels, if you like. Well, that was only mildly uncomfortable. But in order to give a truthful account of life with ulcerative colitis, I think it was worth the blushes. Better out than in as they say.

Snapshot circa '97

I hit the stool like the shipwrecked hit land. I was full to the brim drunk and I couldn’t hide it if I tried. My fingers curled around a glass. Which pub I was in I didn’t know. They all looked the same and after nine o’clock they took the menus away with the pub’s name on them. Looking around didn’t help; fathers dancing with daughters, work clothes passing for good in the gloom, money counted out beneath tables, racing slip confetti on the floorboards, swear words punctuating tobacco stained sentences. Then I remembered. It was in my hand; a scrap of paper, just a corner of something else. And written on it was a snippet, just a few little words. In a drunken version of my handwriting it read ‘THE WIGGLE WAS FUN, WELL IT WAS BEFORE. THE HAIR IS NOW GREY, BUT WHAT THE HEY!’ Seventeen words, in four lines, sealed with an exclamation mark, which I normally don’t like. I guess it was a poem of sorts. A memory tumbled into focus. It was written about and for the woman sitting beside me. I was going to give it to her. How many men in her life had presented her a poem? I was confident none. I slid the poem along the bar and fixed my eyes on hers as she read my words.
“What is it?”
“Read it.”
“I can’t, it’s all blurred.”
She was right. It was unreadable. I had slid it through a ring of beer left by a glass.
“What did it say?”
“It was a poem. I wrote it for you.”
“You remember how it goes?”
“I do, but it was meant to be read, I don’t want to say it out loud.”
“Oh.”
She wiggled a hand in front of my face. No wedding ring, I noted. Then I understood and began to write the poem on the back of her hand.
“I’m Very.”
I stopped writing. I wait for more. It doesn’t come.
“That’s your name?”
“Very Ellis.”
“It’s a very unusual name.”
“Well, it’s very me. Have you finished?”
I nod, I had. She takes her hand back and fishes for a cigarette.
“Aren’t you going to read it then?” I say.
“Later I will.”
“It’s not long.”
“I know, but I like to read in bed.”

Now I’m not drinking pubs just aren’t the same. Pubs these days are like swimming pools that have been drained; everything pretty much looks the same, but the vital ingredient that made it fun is missing. Stepping into a pub used to be like stepping through a portal to another world. A more colourful world where only the Guinness was black and white. Alcohol was your passport. With pint in hand you never knew where you would end up. Every pub had its cast of characters ready to act out the play for today solely for your entertainment. There were the dodgy geezers who’d try and sell you static caravans in the Essex hinterlands, the Jackanory merchants who had all had trials for Spurs , the pasty faced bores, the fruit machine feeders, the fat jokers crying on the inside, the ex-cons, the wastrels, the floozies, the braggers, the diehard dandies, the lonely, the incoherent and confused, pantomime landladies who could sniff out trouble at a hundred yards and pub dogs that would sniff your crotch. Like toys that come to life at night they would play and fight and squabble and love while no one was looking. Except someone was looking, and how I miss it now.

Oi-Oi!

Walthamstow has the longest street market in Europe. A steel and canvas spine of 400 stalls stretches the High Street for about a mile, a mish-mash of colours, smells, sounds, a collage of cultures all jammed up against each other. 147 languages are spoken in the borough of Waltham Forest alone. A walk from one end to the other is a bit like crossing a hundred international borders. It’s quite an experience on a Saturday morning. The first time I went I witnessed a full on fight between a Cor Blimey female fruit and veg seller and a Pakistani woman. It was a proper hair pulling, face scratching, obscenity spewing, tussle of pure violence. Probably over the price of cherry tomatoes. That’s what Walthamstow Market is like. Of course, between bouts of WWF (Walthamstow Women’s Fighting) there’s shopping to do. So grab your basket and join me on a meander through the stalls. Keep your wits about you and your elbows in; this is bandit country. First stop, the fruit and veg stall. Be careful around here, it’s like a youth club for dysfunctional wasps. Right, what do I want...hmmm, cabbage is out, and broccoli, cauliflower, sprouts, corn on the cob, mushrooms, tomatoes, onions, peas and broad beans. Carrots and potatoes it is, then. Can’t have any acidic fruits, so no oranges or grapefruit. Not allowed fruit with seeds or skin, so bang goes your berries and your grapes. I’ve never had much time for the apple so I’m hardly going to bother peeling one. I’ll have a few bananas. Through the bobbing heads the cheese stall comes into view. I am a sucker for any kind of cheese. My pulse quickens and all I can see is stilton, all I can think is stilton, all I want in life is stilton. I want all my clothes to be made of stilton just so every night I can eat them off when I go to bed…a sharp mental slap brings me to my senses. Cheese is off limits, banished with all other dairy produce. Best keep moving. We pass a stall selling plastic bowls, plastic cups, plastic colanders, plastic cutlery, plastic toilet brushes, even plastic fruit. I wonder if I’m allowed plastic fruit? Yum. I ignore all the fabulous smelling wholemeal granary loaves and opt for a retro 1970’s style sliced white loaf. Mustn’t have any insoluble fibre or as it’s otherwise known, the tasty stuff. Oi-Oi! is the market traders’ call of choice in Walthamstow. The air is thick with Oi-Oi!’s battling it out for our attention. I’m nearly done though; shopping is no fun with ulcerative colitis. It’s a frustrating task, which requires monk-like levels of self-control. So if it’s all the same to you I’m going to leave you to look around yourself. There’s plenty more to see, just remember you’re not in Waitrose now.

Wednesday's diary on a Thursday 0.6

It thinks I don’t know what it’s up to, but I do. My UC is playing silly buggers, you see; it always behaves itself on Wednesdays, because it knows whatever it gets up to will be published here on Thursdays. So on Wednesdays my UC is as good as gold, all doe-eyed innocence and butter wouldn’t melt harmlessness. But the moment the spotlight is off it, the angelic veneer is gone and it’s business as usual. If this was called Monday’s diary on a Tuesday it’d tell a very different story. So here it is, Wednesday’s (not a true reflection of how things really are) diary on a Thursday.

Wednesday 22nd August:
6.30am Loose, blood
8.05am Loose, gassy
1.45pm Loose, light blood
4.00pm Stool

Medication:
6 x Mesalazine 400mg
4 x Prednisolone 5mg
1 x Asacol Mesalazine foam enema
3 x Ferrous Sulphate 200mg
2 x Calcium Carb 1.25g

Comments:
Dropped to 4 Prednisolone. Less crampy stomach pains. Feel like things are improving very, very, very slowly.

Wednesday's diary on a Thursday 0.5

Welcome, poop fans, it's Thursday, which can only mean one thing...it's Top of the Plops.

Wednesday 15th August:
6.15am Watery, light blood
8.15am Gassy, light blood
11.35am Loose stool (Threw up, too)
1.20pm Loose stool
6.35pm Loose stool


Medication:
6 x Mesalazine 400mg
5 x Prednisolone 5mg
1 x Asacol Mesalazine foam enema
3 x Ferrous Sulphate 200mg
2 x Calcium Carb 1.25g

Comments:
Decided to only take the enema at bedtime. Seems to upset my stomach in the mornings. Upped the iron tablets as my doctor ordered. Why I was sick is a complete mystery, so I'm not going to worry about it; a one off, freak incident.