I don't know if anyone else out there will share this in common with me. I really hope so. I'm tormented very much by this and have never met anyone who feels the way I do. I am worried I am strange.
I actually have a J pouch and sometimes I forget I do. I had my takedown in 2011, had about 7 weeks of butt burn and maybe one bout of what was possibly pouchitis and then golden. I got a job 6 weeks out of the hospital and have been living life on a fast track ever since. I actually forgot the dates of my surgeries for a moment when I was filling out my profile - that's how far removed I am from my illness now. I had a ton of complications when I was going through my surgeries and thought there would be no hope. i read all kinds of horror stories online and thought for sure I was doomed. But the normal distribution doesn't lie. 68% of us do amazing, and 95% of us have a very satisfactory outcome. So your chances of success are high, and the internet is skewed. (Ok i needed to put some optimism on here. I know I needed it when I was going through this surgery process.)
However, I am still tormented by my illness past for some reason. I wish I could just get over it. It seems so stupid, right? I'm well now. Why am I still tormented? I see all these people who were never sick and I'm jealous of the time they had to build their careers. I feel like I have to live three days for every day just to catch up to where I feel like I'm supposed to be. I'm 32 and I've never made much money in my life and I always felt like I'd be able to do something significant with my life, that would change something about the world, that would have an impact, but it hasn't happened because my whole life up until a year ago was devoted to colitis. I'm scared that for the decade of fighting I did to get well, the fact that I lost my twenties to UC has screwed me, even though I'm well now. It feels like it doesn't matter how hard I fought - in the end I still get nothing. I feel like a bad person, ungrateful, for seeing my health simply as a consolation prize. I'm suffering from mental health issues now to the point where I've been in a psychiatric hospital because I can't get over the trauma of never being able to trust any decisions I make because of how flare-ups would always take away anything I was working on at the time. Any time I was in a relationship or I had a cool job going or an interesting class or a degree program or a business idea, I'd be in the hospital inside of 6 months and would have to drop it or if I didn't have to drop it, I could never really devote my time and energy to it because I was always fatigued or broke from searching for doctors or trying treatments or trying to pay medical debt. It was hard to keep a job, and therefore health insurance, because of the flares. I want the time that I lost. I still want my dreams to come true and when I got well, when I first started to really feel good after my take-down, I thought I had the world in the palm of my hands. But I don't. I just feel like a 32 year old loser. Am I a twisted ungrateful person? I think I must be. My marriage is on the verge of collapse over my depression...everything I built up and worked for is coming apart. I had such hope for my life and now I am just overwhelmed with anxiety that STILL nothing is going to work. Sometimes my husband, who has a PhD and his own company, even says to me, "You will never be as successful as me. You had an illness. You don't have the time that I had to build your career. You have to accept that." But I don't want to accept that. I want to believe I still have a chance to be somebody.
I decided to post this on the J pouch forum because I don't know too many other illnesses where full recovery is possible. What is it like out there for people who go from being bed ridden and dependent on others to working and running around and living a full life in less than a year? It's a bizarre transition that I'm having a hard time with. You'd think a transition into something good would be easy -- I thought it would be! But it was very jarring. Being sick and dependent is a mindset that has to be unlearned. At least for me. Has anyone had to unlearn being sick and seeing themselves as sick? Has anyone ever felt jealous of people who never had illnesses and never had to doubt themselves or lose time in their careers/lives?
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