Some people think that you need to be a certain age before conversation can settle fully around body parts and bodily functions by means of greeting.
Well. My experiences have certainly aged me in some ways, where I have as little shame talking about my bowel as a random eighty-year-old woman on the bus might have about her kidney function.
And here's the thing: I know that many of you have been praying specifically for my body over the course of this trip. I have two things to say to these people. Firstly, thank you, thank you, thank you; the compassion that you demonstrate by acknowledging these very real variables in my day-to-day life truly touches me and makes it difficult to type as I tear up. We've been addressing this unmet need for compassion in therapy, and I'm trying to find better ways to ask for it or to encourage it further when I see it. Thank you again. Secondly, I feel that I owe these persons an update as to how the trip went within this sort of perspective.
How my body might handle the changes and stresses of the trip was one of the most important factors for me when planning the trip itself. My greatest fear, as I've mentioned before, is that my body would collapse in the middle of the trip and wind up in the hospital or otherwise inhibit my ability to do things, meaning that I would be in Norway but only come away with memories of the hotel room having to rest through all of that precious time. The anxiety around that latter option was very real because it was highly plausible; the other, well, I have an active imagination and still know how to say "hospital" and "doctor" in Norwegian, just in case.
Now when I mention those fears, there is an important piece of information to help mention: one of them happened.
I have an abscess that is in such a position that we can never deal with it fully, aside from more or less taking out the rectum (i.e. have an ostomy for the rest of my life). I have a permanent fistula (Crohn's patients are prone to these, where the body makes weird little connections between different places) that happens to connect between this abscess and out through the skin, so it does drain on its own. However, sometimes the abscess gets a little out of control, where my energy levels plummet, my appetite goes, pain around that abscess and fistula, and a certain kind of pressure from the abscess itself that is a different kind of painful. Historically, this has meant a round of antibiotics to give my body a leg up. Please pardon the pun--this knocks me on my ass and it can do so quite suddenly.
This started flaring up to the point where I was certain it was happening again about three days before our trip. I made some very assertive calls to my doctor's office and got the antibiotics started. This lead to two conflicting emotions, one being frustration that once again my body had fallen apart at a rather inopportune time and the other being relief, that it had at least fallen apart at a time I could ask for help, rather than trying to figure out how to get a round of antibiotics going while in a foreign country. The worst (as far as probabilities) had already happened so I was no longer dreading it.
Between the medicine kicking in, eating poorly, and the stress of travel, I was a couple shades of miserable for the first three days or so of the trip. There was a part of me that was very certain that this was going to be as good as it was going to be, that this had been a failed experiment and travel truly was out of my grasp. And then, things started to turn around. This isn't to say that there weren't still points where I felt a little blah, but on the whole my optimism started to return and we started to find a schedule, which included eating more often (particularly with all of the added exercise of walking everywhere) and slowly reintroducing carbs to make it easier to find a quick meal once our energy had run down.
The museum schedules in Norway for the winter months seemed to be enforcing this idea of stopping for self-care, with most open from between 11-1500 or maybe 1600. We couldn't cram in too many museums in a day, we slept in, and then we had to find a cafe for a snack anyway around closing time before wandering into some different stores or returning to the hotel for a little while before deciding where we wanted to walk to for supper. It also helped us keep a good, lazy kind of pace, while still seeing as much as we could. This did mean we missed out on a few museums, but that gives us yet another reason to go back.
Eventually, we found a good groove, planning out a couple of things to do everyday but allowing the random conversations and wandering around to get lost in the right ways to fill in the gaps between meals, museums, and shopping.
Around the end, we began to grow tired of being on vacation but certainly not of being in the country. And I survived it--my body held out and I was also able to enjoy myself.
"Adventure" might well be something that I can reclaim from Crohn's. ...but I might have to take a couple more trips to Norway, just to be sure.
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