Melvin & Me, Part 36: Meds Day

At this point in my Crohn's journey, we've hit a good stride and pattern for treatment.  In other words, the things that I do to maintain are firmly into routine by this point.  This emphatically does not mean that there are not ways that my condition is present in my day-to-day life, but instead it means that these interruptions have become normalized.  This difference is important--my chronic illness is never "over" and is always at least quietly constant in my life.  Quiet, but never forgotten.  

Melvin, certainly, is the broadest change, needing to plan and react to my ostomy's needs in a day, over the week, over a trip, etc.  I have routine doctors' appointments and bloodwork and a colonoscopy every three years.  I take daily medications and have done so since I was twelve.  However, one of the largest parts of my care plan is a medication infusion that I get every eight weeks.  I tend to call it "going in for scheduled maintenance."  

This entails feeling a little run-down a few days before the appointment itself.  When I'm honest with myself, I'm not fully sure whether this is because I'm truly physically more fatigued OR if I am more receptive to a particular kind of tired that is usually ignored.  I allow myself to check-in with my body on a deeper level.  The whole day, even as there are other tasks, centers around self-compassion to my body.  

I practice self-accompaniment on these days.  I am intentionally with myself.  I sympathize with my own annoyance that I have to interrupt my schedule to sit at my doctor's office for an hour and forty-five minutes and get poked for yet another IV.  I resonate with past moments of myself trying to schedule and arrange the next infusion around the rest of my schedule, now that I have been getting infusions of some kind for over ten years at this point.  I focus on my resignation toward this interruption, acknowledging its necessity.  I consider my gratitude that I have insurance to pay for the $15K bill every eight weeks, that I am no longer on the medication that takes four hours to infuse, and most importantly that this medication regime is working.  

In other words, there is grief, in all its multilayered glory.  Infusion days become their own ritual, a space where I am already forced to physically tend to the realities of my condition so I choose to also make it a place to emotionally acknowledge them as well.  That means that one way or another, I am pretty tired by the end of the day, either because the infused medication is settling in or because I have been working internally all the same.  

And then in another eight weeks it's time to do it again.