Ups and Downs

Life is a series of ups and downs. If you're lucky, there are more ups than there are downs.

Daily life for someone with endometriosis, depending on severity, certainly has its share of health and emotional ups and downs. Some days you feel good—really good, normal even—and you might even forget that you have endometriosis at all. Some days may be so bad you can't even function, and you think you'll never survive this down. Other days are somewhere in the middle. Maybe you have a spot in the day where your digestion is out of whack or you're experiencing some pain, but for the most part you feel OK. If you're in that middle area, the symptoms come and go—rather unpredictably sometimes—but at least they do go away and leave you able to function and feeling alright.

Ups and downs in my life in general, beyond those caused by endometriosis, have kept me away from this blog for the past few months. Sometimes life just gets in the way of things, and that was the case with me. As I've mentioned before, I know stress triggers my endo symptoms, so when other parts of my life get in the way, I have to choose what to let go of for a while so I don't overburden myself. For a while, blogging (and keeping up with others' blogs and Twitter and the like) was one of the things that I had to dump off of my plate.

During those few months, however, I was able to continue with my mostly gluten-free diet (aside from a slip-up perhaps once a week when I allow myself a bite of a particularly lovely piece of bread or a tiny sliver of someone's homemade pie). And I've switched my birth control regime so I skip the non-active week of pills, which seems to have evened things out a bit more. I'm also getting to work out a bit more regularly and take more time for myself, which helps greatly.

I still have moments when I get twinges of pain or even a few hours here or there where I struggle with what's going on in my body. A few days a month I still battle some nausea, but some months it's nearly nonexistent. I'm getting much more sleep this summer than I do during the school year, though I still feel a bit fatigued at times. Overall I think I'm doing pretty well.

I continue to look into new ways I can lessen the impact endo has on my life and ensure I'm as healthy and happy as can be, and I hope now to get back to sharing some of what I've learned here. I've realized recently that endo is far from an isolated illness where you have a set list of symptoms that you can reliably identify. Besides the "typical" (if there is such a thing) symptoms of endometriosis, the disease causes or works in concert with a whole range of other illnesses and ailments, a few of which I never even realized were connected until recently. That's something I've been thinking about a lot lately and no doubt will be writing more about soon.

What ups and downs have you experienced recently with your endo?