Joy, I have issues with my stomach. I’ve been sitting up for the last two hours feeling sick to my stomach and I hate it. This happens pretty often (two or three times a month) and I hate that I just have to wait for it to pass. I feel trapped in my own body when this happens, like I’m a prisoner. How do you deal with feeling like that?
I’m sorry you’re not feeling well, I hope whatever it is passes soon and you can rest.
And usually by crying tbh. And I don’t just mean that in a despairing way, I mean I actually let myself cry when I feel overwhelmed by symptoms because it helps reset stress hormones, and has a better effect on both my physical and mental health than allowing it to stay pent up. For a long time I always refused to cry when I felt overwhelmed or in too much pain to cope, I thought it meant I was defeated. Turns out by not letting myself have a good cry when my body needed to was was prolonging a lot of bad stress hormones that just caused havoc with my brain chemistry. The more you know.
I also try to distract myself in flare up moments, so I’ve got something other than the pain to focus on. If I’m feeling too dizzy and sick to social media or read, I will put on an audio book or film that I love, and lose myself in the familiarity of the words. It’s something I don’t have to think about and find soothing which is nice when my brain just wants to scream at the frailty of this mortal coil.
Other times I want people to talk to and will reach out, but most of the time when I feel bad I just want to be left alone. People take a lot of my energy, even when they’re trying to be helpful, so sometimes it’s just nice to lay down in a dark room and not have to be “On” and let myself have a good bawl and rest.
Of course ideally, you want to figure out what might be causing it and try to find a way of remedying it or improving upon current methods of controlling it. Do you have any idea what might be causing it? Such as an underlying health issue, or is this something you’re just not sure where to even begin with?
The latter can be extremely overwhelming, especially if others don’t really get it or try to play down your suffering. People don’t really get how awful some things can be until they experience them first hand. The first time my mother had reflux she thought she was having a heart attack. Nope, that’s just acid hitting your esophagus, welcome to hell.
But y’know, ultimately it will pass, the flare up will end and some normalcy will return. And that is something useful to hang onto when you feel like hot garbage.
