It's been another quite rough week. I'm glad I listened to my body enough last weekend to make the decision to stay home and rest but I still needed to take a couple of days sick leave from work. I had logged on as normal on Monday morning but it became clear quite quickly that sheer determination alone wasn't going to cut it.
With pain levels going up and having to lean on my codeine a lot more, I inevitably had the digestive issues that follow. Long term codeine use causes constipation. It's really not fun when you've been battling one type of abdominal pain to then be forced to put up with another. It can almost reduce you to tears when you know you're backed up and it just isn't happening.
So with my pelvis being on my fire, sleep being elusive and not being able to perform the basic function of bowel evacuation, I was pretty much done and took some Dulcolax and waited.
After three days of no action I was feeling completely fed up, listless and heavy. It's always about balance and it's one of the worst things about a flare-up because it just sends so many systems haywire. It's exhausting.
Things did start moving but it was like an over course correction. My stomach decided it hated everything leading to IBS explosions and feeling turned inside out. Lovely.
After a couple of joyful days of this and the - ahem - backlog was cleared, I started to feel less like a useless skin bag. Treating myself to a pretty new dress aided me in this.
It's now the end of the week and thanks to some lovely and thoughtful people at work, I managed to have a quiet three days back. In all honesty, I could probably have done with taking Wednesday off as well but it's the weekend now. I made it.