Lessons learned from being ill

I have recently had an opportunity to ponder health in a more personal and intimate way than is usual, and so I hope that you will forgive me for an article that is more personal than usual.

On the Friday before Christmas I began to experience severe stomach upset after having gone to dinner with friends. I assumed that I had salmonella.

I saw a doctor about the diarrhoea and she basically took some samples for bacterial testing and told me not to worry unless it continued. The intestinal upset remained and I began to exhibit signs of severe dehydration – despite the fact that I was both drinking and taking electrolyte supplements. My pulse was highly elevated (tackicardic) and I was very weak with low blood pressure.

We went into the emergency department of the hospital where I was admitted and placed on a drip.

Through further investigation (colonoscopy) it was discovered that I have Crohn’s disease – a form of inflammatory bowel disease. It wasn’t a condition that I had really heard of three weeks ago.

My initial response to this was disbelief and a fair amount of fear. There is currently no cure for Crohn’s disease, at least according to conventional medicine, I am yet to get out of hospital and consult my alternative practitioner.

The drugs that are used to control it are a mixture of steroids and immune suppressants – anathema for me – I don’t even like to take mild pain killers.

For someone who has always made such an effort to eat healthily (no tea, coffee, tobacco, alcohol, lots of fibre, fruit, veg, beans, etc) it seemed rather unfair to me that I should have this problem.

But in the two weeks I have been in hospital I have had quite a lot of time to think and I have learned a few interesting lessons.

Firstly that to a large extent our bodies are beyond our control. There is a lot of medical research for and against certain things and it can be used as a really valuable guide, but at the end of the day we are not in total control. Our genetics, a bug, just a random upset can attack the health of the most conscientiously healthy person.

And what have I learned from this? Definitely not to be bitter. And not to toss healthy eating and lifestyle aside, or say that it doesn’t work.

What it has been is the most fantastic clarifying experience – it has helped me focus upon what is really important in my life, it has helped me to discard a lot of the mental and emotional “noise” that is a bigger enemy to quality of life than ill health is.
For example, I am much less interested in expending emotional energy upon being “right” than I was. What I mean by that is that I do not need to insist on my point of view at the expense of my relationships with other people. I am happy to share my point of view as coherently as I can and then listen to theirs, really listen and change my point of view if I think that is needed.

I have also gained greater appreciation for my body and more respect for its needs. I am much more caring towards it. More aware of how I should love it and not just use it as a tool to be pushed.

What will I do differently in my life as a result of these things? I will take time to do a massage course with my husband. I will find time for exercise that I really love such as dancing, hiking and water aerobics. I will plan meals properly ahead, not just grab something, resentful at the time that it takes to prepare good food.

I feel much more aware and concerned about others. I value them more. Life is short and each life should be treasured and beautiful. It is a sense of the sacredness of life that has touched my soul – in a way that is not easy to verbalise.

Closely linked to this appreciation for others is a deeper appreciation for my relationships with them. My husband, my parents, my siblings and friends and probably above all, the Lord.

I appreciate more deeply the love that all these relationships represent, that my relationships with them are the most life giving and important things.

The fact that I have learnt these lessons and feel grateful for the experience does not mean that it has all been plain sailing emotionally or spiritually. And there are some things that I have found were crucial in making this experience positive and keeping it positive on a daily basis.

Gratitude is the first that springs to mind. I have found it important to be grateful for the improvements my health has made, even if small.

I think this gratitude is important for a number of reasons.

It keeps me positive and positivity is powerful. People who are positive are happier and less stressed, and the less stressed we are the better health we have.

Counting out all the things that I am grateful for (I do it in prayer, but it can just be done in meditation depending upon your faith) stops despair setting in. And despair has to be avoided. Despair leads to misery and all kinds of self destructive thinking and behaviour.

So I go over in prayer all the small improvements, all the things that could be worse.

I haven’t had any adverse reactions to the drugs. I haven’t developed a clot, I haven’t had to have a blood transfusion, although my haemoglobin was very low, I haven’t had pain or nausea, I have been able to get all the fluids and potassium I needed. I could have had arthritis, eye trouble, kidney problems fistulas, ulcers leaking into my body cavity, all from the Crohn’s disease, and I haven’t had any of that. They could have cut or punctured my intestine while doing the colonoscopy and it went smoothly without me remembering any of it. The health care I have received has been great, all the doctors and nurses excellent.

One of the most important things I have decided is that I am not allowing this health care problem to become the primary source of meaning in my life.
It can be easy to make a health concern the primary source of meaning in our lives. Especially if we want to take an active role in managing our own health.
We can over analyse our health. Eating healthily becomes a “religion” that takes too much of our thoughts and emotions. When we succeed and eat healthily we feel validated, strong and righteous. When we slip up we punish ourselves and feel that we have to atone by being extra vigilant. We feel a despair out of proportion to the crime.

There are many people out there who are seeking to control their health through healthy eating and this is fantastic, but all too often there is a temptation to spend more time and emotional energy on this task than it needs. Plan a healthy meal, cook a healthy meal and eat a healthy meal. But have other things in your life that are also goals, that give meaning and purpose to your life. Otherwise, you don’t really have a balanced life, just a balanced diet.

And these deeper things that feed are souls are what sustains us when our health is bad. As our health inevitably will be, to a greater or lesser degree. We are all going to grow old and die, if we don’t die young, and as we grow older our health deteriorates. It is at this time in our lives that our years of character development can become very obvious. I have known older people who are bitter and frustrated at the idea of aging, as though life has played them a cruel joke, and then I have known older people who have faced old age with a joy and gratitude that was second nature to them. They were by far the happier and pleasanter people to be around.

I am actually a lot happier than I was before I became ill, and it is because I am more grateful, more focused on people and more aware of the truly important things in life.

Processed food is not the answer to health

The Best foods, the foods that you really like, are they the childhood foods that you grew up on? Do the best tasting foods have an association with a positive experience? And the most awful food, is that the food that you ate that made you sick all night? Where did you learn how to cook? How do you know what food is good for you and what is not? Does the knowledge that you have about food come from your parents, your culture and the teachers you have had?

In 2005 there were 48695 malls across North America (that is large shopping centers that have large food stores in them). The American population in 2006 is 300 000 406, equating to 6160 people per shopping mall, not including all the stand alone stores. And each of these malls is filled with food that is enhanced and wrapped in cellophane wrap. Of the money spent on food by Americans 90% is used to buy processed food.

Yet are American’s happy with their food choices? Every day 1207 people search on line at google alone for “healthy eating”. It seems that many Americans are struggling to understand how to eat a healthy balanced diet. Statistically 3.8 million Americans are over 300 pounds and 400 000 people are heavier then 400 pounds. The average weight of women is 163 pounds. Figures suggest that most of this obesity is lifestyle related, rather than due to medical causes. This bares out the fact that people in America no longer know how to eat healthily anymore. Obesity is not the only indicator that our food choices are not healthy. Given that 90% of US household food budget is used on processed food, it should perhaps be a subject of concern that the FDA keeps a list of 3000 chemicals that are added to processed food and not all of these chemicals have been properly tested.

For those not happy with the standard diet and diseases of North America, other cultures can offer some interesting alternatives, both as regards to food and health care. Although “traditional” cultures, such as American Indians in the past and Africans in the present do face their own nutritional problems (limited variety, famine) adopting their reliance on fresh food into our situation of plenty could have decided advantages. Foods from the garden and the hunt - are better for the body than those which are processed. It is with devastating results that the American Indians are finding this out again as diabetes and other traditionally white American nutritional and life style diseases become the norm and not the exception.

The body can let us know when it is craving certain nutrients. Most pregnant women experience cravings or at least aversions to certain foods. Is it necessary to wait for an unborn embryo to remind us that the body can be a well balanced machine capable of self diagnosis.

Those Americans committed to healthy eating will still have to face the ever present push of advertising that aims to sell processed food to us. This has a particularly profound impact upon our children who are known to be more susceptible to advertising messages. In a study by National Bureau of Economic Research it was found that a ban on fast food restaurant advertising would decrease childhood obesity in 3-11 year olds by 10% and in 12-18 year olds by 12%. The effectiveness of advertising was seen when the U S Department of State ran ads about integrating Muslims in to the community and being more tolerant. There was a marked trend toward acceptance of Muslims between 2002 and 2003 while these ads were being displayed. There is nothing to suggest that food advertising is any less powerful.

As well as laying out large amounts of money on advertising, some global food corporations are involved in “bio-prospecting”. This involves the “discovery”, patenting and introduction of certain foods or food traditions from other countries into America. India has recently fought a $30 million court battle to have patents reversed which saw Global corporations steal traditional Indian health and cuisine knowledge and patent it. This bio prospecting has led India along with nine other countries including China and Brazil to start compiling the “Traditional Knowledge Digital Library” which will include 20 million pages of traditional knowledge to stop bio- prospecting, by proving that the knowledge was in prior existence and there fore cannot be patented.

A recent set of articles in the Public Library of Science Medicine raise further questions about multinational companies and their attitude to public health as opposed to private profits. The articles talk about pharmaceutical companies which are creating “diseases” out of the normal conditions of ageing, such as menopause, as well as pushing certain diseases to be much more prevalent than they are, for example male and female sexual disfunctionality. The net result is that more medications are sold than in the past, but with sometimes ambiguous results for the end user, as in the case of Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) for menopausal women

With these things in mind, it may benefit the American consumer to evaluate carefully their sources of knowledge when it comes to health and nutrition, and to endeavor to make the most reasonable unprocessed choices we can.