Unedited

Ulcerative colitis was my first diagnosis. This past Monday was my first day at a new job. I'm working at the transplant center where I received my liver transplant almost fifteen years ago. My colitis flared with a vengeance Sunday night after being quiescent for a good, long while. As I waited for my day to start I looked around the waiting room in the liver clinic where I used to sit, newly cut open and reorganized, waiting for someone to come get me. When I first got out of the hospital I had to go to clinic every day for a month. The halls seemed so long as I shuffled along the carpet on my way to the elevator. Getting up from a chair made me look like a hunched, old woman bent over as I was to protect my abdomen held together with 55 staples in the shape of an upside-down T.

Colitis is...embarrassing. It's about poop and intestines and blood and nothing I ever really want to talk about so I rarely do. I certainly didn't want to greet my new employers with any details of this, even as I thought about how they more than anyone know some of the stories my body has told over the years. So I took deep breaths and excused myself when necessary and left early, my stomach clenching in pain. The rest of the week I spent in bed or on the couch. Sometimes I played with the kids but usually my husband took care of them, with the help of many other members of our team. I hardly ate anything. The idea of food sounded bad all around.

Someone once told me that with bowel disease or lots of diarrhea you end up flushing all of the good hormones right out of your body. The dopamine, the serotonin. That felt like a relief to me, to know that something scientific was occurring because these colitis flares make me so drained completely of all hope and happiness. I can almost recognize the untruth of the feelings because they are so pervasive that I have to remind myself that I don't actually hate everything in my life. That's not me...right?

Folding laundry on Thursday night I started crying. Matching one tiny pant leg to another to fold away a pair of size 9 month pants I felt the weight of time and its passage. It's excruciating slowness, it's warp speed. I remember sitting on the same couch, discussing our surprise pregnancy with fear and worry. Those surprise babies turn one today. My big twins are talking more and more and looking more and more like little kids.

Have to stop because there's crying from one of the kids' rooms. The birthday party starts soon. This is just a tiny scrape off the surface of more than two weeks worth of thoughts and words that have been wanting to come out but haven't.