What do you have, what illness? Every time I hear people who have your health history but stay sick, I always think they're full of shit, but you had it and improved so maybe they're not full of shit. What is the original illness?
This is a long one, you’re going to be sorry you asked and everyone should probably just skip it:
Well one of them is Crohn’s disease, which is probably the most hilarious disease you could ever have. I wouldn’t leave the house without wearing a Depends. I was a shit machine and a puke machine. Even at the time I thought it was pretty funny.
That’s the one that took the biggest bite out of my health. By the time I was diagnosed I looked like a skeleton. I was bleeding internally and the inflammation was out of control and they found precancerous cells. I’m trying to remember which drug it was that really fucked me up, I think it was mercaptopurine. I was very motivated to get off of medication. One of them absolutely killed my immune system and a couple of times I got so sick that I hallucinated.
It’s under control now and I’m not on any medications for it, but that took years of fine-tuning my diet to see what I reacted to and what I didn’t. Even just fiber. Too little or too much and I’m in the bathroom for hours a day.
It’s a lot of work, so I do understand when people have certain diseases or disorders and it completely wrecks their lives. I don’t really like to tolerate their excuses, but for some of them, a minority of them, they aren’t just making excuses. It’s fucking hard.
Also, they trust their doctors. Sometimes they shouldn’t. It wasn’t until I ditched my doctors that I got better. But that’s counterintuitive so I don’t necessarily blame people for not figuring that out. I was desperate and motivated so I figured it out.
While I was on the corticosteroids and the other drugs, I got really really fat. Normally you’re only on corticosteroids until you get your inflammation under control but my doctor at that time kept me on them. I switched doctors and they immediately tapered me off because it was an insane dosage for an insane amount of time and it was doing me legitimate harm.
So I sympathize with people who don’t understand how dumb some doctors can be and reckless. They don’t understand there are alternatives to medication, they don’t understand that there are alternatives to listening to your doctor. They also told me I had really high cholesterol and that I should stop eating steak and eggs when I was getting in shape. I increased my steak and my eggs and my cholesterol actually went down. Some podcasts that I listen to in the fitness community set me straight on how cholesterol works and they were right and my doctors were wrong.
A majority of doctors are wrong about a lot of stuff.
The only thing I’m on medication for now is my blood clotting disorder, which my hematologist/oncologist said was caused by a genetic mutation of some kind. My blood clots too fast and too easily. Even with the medication it’s just a matter of time until I get another one. That’s fun to think about each night when you go to sleep and you’re not sure if you’re gonna wake up the next day.
I knew that physical activity would help me immensely so I tried to get an arrangement for physical therapy but even my second, better doctor was still an idiot and told me the situation was hopeless. So I did my own research on fitness, on how to basically rebuild my entire body from the ground up and it took years of work, research and focus.
My thyroid also doesn’t function properly. The fatigue was overwhelming until I decided to do something about it. I do have empathy for those people who seem to have some kind of medical issue that makes them tired and lazy all the time because I don’t know if those are real disorders or not. But I noticed they’re also not actively trying to do anything about it most times. They just accept it.
I have no tolerance for that.
