Thursday, 29 August 2013

Where I'm at...

If I was writing a report about my current UC condition I'd say, "it's good, but it could be better". This is because I'm still taking mesalazine tablets and my thought is that if I have to help my body with man-made drugs then it's not working properly. Personally I can't call it remission until I am drug free, but that's just me!

There are plenty of UCers who are happy to get to a place where they have a normal life on maintenance drugs and I can't argue with that. The phrases, 'each to their own' and 'horses for courses' was invented for this disease I think.

At the beginning of the year I started to improve from my longest and most recent flare-up. I slowly decreased the mesalazine tablets as I have always done until it got to May, when I was down to 1 tablet per day. However, unlike previous flare-ups where I was able to stop the tablets, this time mild symptoms began to increase as I continued on 1 tablet per day.

Wisely, before things deteriorated, I immediately increased the dosage to 6 tablets a day which meant I only experienced a mild flare-up that lasted until about 5 weeks ago. However, if I look back at my Colitis diary, I can see how I lapsed back into eating the wrong things. For someone with a disease of the large colon I am annoyed I allowed myself to do this!

I'm not saying my diet was terrible, I've learnt that I have to be careful with my staple diet, I can't allow man-made/processed foods to become part of my routine. However, I had started eating them occasionally. That, along with some BBQs and the odd snack, meant that I was creating work for my system.

So where am I at today? Well, I've started to decrease the mesalazine tablets again. I'm about to go to 4 per day in September (I decrease the dosage by 1 tablet per month). This time however, I'm watching my diet very carefully (my current regime can be found here). I've learnt that not only do I have to change my diet until my symptoms improve, I now have to stick with it.

I'm also hoping to help my entire digestive system by adding new healthy areas to my regime, for instance, I've recently begun juicing - and that's a topic for a new blog post!

Welcome to my Colitis Blog!

First of all I'd like to say hello to anyone who reads this! Welcome to my first post on my first blog!

Blogging isn't something I thought I'd find myself doing, perhaps because the internet seems to have so much information in so many places by so many people. Literally billions of pages of text of which I'm sure most aren't read!

However, when a blog contains information that might just benefit someone's health, I think it becomes a lot more important. In reference to Colitis, I know how much I've searched around for ideas, info, symptoms, diets, food types, research papers, meds etc. etc. Suddenly the world wide web reveals just what an amazing innovation it is!!

To think that when I was first diagnosed with Ulcerative Colitis (the mid 90's), there was hardly anywhere to find information on it and even though I'd never heard of Colitis, I don't think the specialist even gave me a pamphlet to look at!! You have to laugh!

So the reason I've decided to start this blog is partly because Colitis is so individual that I believe there IS room for yet another blog and partly because it may be a useful record to look back on with reference to the UCer website.

You could read 50 blogs by UCers and their diet, meds, symptoms won't match your own. So, I'm hoping this blog might give someone with IBD an idea they hadn't thought of or the incentive to try something new in the fight for remission. This then, is a good enough reason to add more text to the world wide web!! :-D