Acknowledging Fatigue as a Symptom

When living with Crohn's disease, it's very easy to recognize when you have a "bad day". Recently for me, a bad day includes fever, chills, more hours spent in the bathroom than sleeping, fatigue, dehydration, sometimes nausea and of course, stomach pain. It's not hard to miss. It's extremely inhibiting, and puts a roadblock on any plans you had for the day, even if your only plan was simply a short work agenda.

In the entire two years since my diagnosis however, I haven't had many "good days", and it's always insightful when I do, because when I do have a rare, really good feeling day, I realize how bad my "normal days" are in actuality.

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I go about my days in typical fashion. I work a seven-to-three, Monday through Friday, work shift. Some days and weeks are more stressful than others. Sometimes I pick up extra shifts, sometimes I put in for a three day weekend. I go to my graduate school class once a week for three hours. On my off time I do various things depending on the day, and how I feel. I like to bike, I like to hike, I walk my dog, I do homework, I watch TV, I read a book, I play video games with my boyfriend. I enjoy countless other activities, but I feel as if naming them here is not the point of this blog entry. The point is, I love many different things. I enjoy being active, I enjoy being outside, and I enjoy playing. How often I actually engage in the playful, active, activities however, is a completely different story...

For a while I attributed much of my "laziness" to getting older (even though I'm only 24), exhaustion from work, etc. I made excuses, and these were my choices. I truly thought that I had just become a lazy person, unwilling to get off my derriere and do things. I never blamed Crohn's, because that was a poor excuse in my mind. I didn't want to be that person who sits there complaining that her illness is making her tired. Turns out, I can't run from that fact of the illness. It took having a really good day to make me realize just how exhausted my body makes me on a daily basis.

The other day, a strange sensation hit me... I was hungry. I wasn't just hungry, I was starving! I would feed the hunger, and it would just return. I couldn't stop myself from stuffing my face, but I really didn't care - it felt good (though it also felt as if I was on Prednisone again!). You might be picturing some girl sitting, surrounded by hoards of food, but that really wasn't the case. The sad reality, is that my face stuffing only amounted to a fairly normal amount of food that one should be consuming each day. Three decent sized meals and a slurry of snacks in between (and perhaps a large slice of chocolate cake). This was lesson one that my good day taught me: On a typical day, my symptoms tend to prevent me from feeling hungry (or hungry enough to really eat my heart out), something that is probably my body trying to prevent excess pain, but something that anyone with general knowledge of nutrition knows will cause you to have less energy.

I have always been somewhat aware of my first lesson, though I keep it in the back of my mind. The second lesson however, was largely what inspired this post: on my really good day, I had energy. I had days worth of energy! I was overly bubbly, and I felt awake. I was running up and down the stairs at work, instead of just trudging slowly while holding onto the railing. I was breezing through tasks, and when I left at the end of the day, I got some chores done at home, went for a walk, and engaged in various other activities, that in hindsight, I realized I would not be able to complete on any given day. On this good day, I wasn't tired when it became a reasonable time to go to bed. I didn't feel exhausted as I do on a typical day.

Turns out, what I defined at the beginning of this post as a "bad day" turned out to be the definition of a "normal day" (minus the fever), with that of a bad day, being the same definition, just multiplied by ten and with the additive of the fever.

This good day turned out to be very enlightening. Though I'm still pretty sure I've become a somewhat lazier version of myself, I realized that perhaps Crohn's fatigue is real (I knew it was real, I just didn't want to admit it, as it seemed like a poor excuse). After the good day, I've promised myself to try to fight the fatigue, now that I experienced what it felt to want to do things again. I let myself go to a dance class the other day, though half way through, I had to mark my movements as I hit a road block in my energy level. But the good day made me realize how much I miss being active. So even though I don't doubt that it will be hard, I'm going to try to make myself fight the fatigue, and hopefully I will thank myself at the end of the day.