Pre disgnosis

I've had quite a few people ask me how life was before the diagnosis so i thought i might try and tackle that- It will probably take me a few entries since I'll be trying to cover 10 years worth of my life (and no doubt forgetting half of it along the way ..) but here goes-

When the doctors at the hospital first told me that the cancer had been in my body for approx 10 years,everyone was stunned and shocked except me.
With hindsight i can almost pinpoint the day in 1999 that i first noticed that things were going a bit wonky with my body. Unfortunetly for me it was with my bowels and ,heavens above, there was NO way i was planning to talk or let on to anyone that there was something strange about my toileting habits!!
To put it simply - before this time i had never paid any attention to my bowels,they had done their thing and i let them get on with it!. Then i started noticing that i felt really ill and nauseous when i needed to 'go' followed by the realisation that i was only going every few days (which,i figured, was why i was feeling ill).
So my first trip to the GP happened around this time. I got a virtual pat on the head and a script for Metumucil (which i have to admit i didnt take) and told to eat more fruit and veges and get more exercise (anyone who knows how much i used to walk should be laughing out loud by now!) .

I went home miffed,vowing not to waste my money on anymore GP visits (little did i know what the future held!).
Slowly things got worse,i was single by this stage so there wasn't anybody around to notice what was going on with me and i did a damn good job of hiding it. I had frequent stomach pains and i started planning my walking routes around public toilets as i wouldn't be able to have a bowel motion for days and then would suddenly have to go right NOW.
It seems crazy writing this all out - how many warning signs did i need?!!! But please keep in mind that i'm covering a 10 year time frame and i did go to MANY gp's and came away being told that i suffered from cronic constipation so i thought it was something that i would just have to learn how to manage.

In 2001 a close friend and i moved down to Christchurch for a while- i had secretly hoped that a change of scene and lifestyle would clean up my body a bit but no such luck. I was using exercise to 'regulate' myself  at this point and had put on quite a bit of weight,going for long walks at nighttime. I remember noticing that i was finding physical activity much more tiring than it used to be but i just put it down to drinking too much and staying up too late.

In 2002 i moved back to Wellington for work,temporarily at first and then permanently as the windy city worked it charms on me (like it always does!). I got into a new relationship and was generally pretty happy with things but was really feeling the strain of trying to keep how i was feeling and what my body was doing a secret from the Man of the Moment (MrS).
I remember eating one evening and having to go and lie down because i was feeling so ill- this is pretty much where the constant nausea starts. Nausea that was just there all the time.
I largely ignored it as much as i could - i had been treated for anxiety for a number of years when i was 18 and the major side effect of that was that i stopped eating and lost 2 stone in a matter of weeks. Because of this i was conditioned to food often making me feel ill and coached myself to believe that it was just a response to thoughts in my head rather than actual true feelings of illness.

I went on a crazy health kick after the nausea started. I stopped drinking, eating sugar, any kind of takeaways  and processed foods and put myself on Dr Sandra Cabot's Liver Cleansing Diet. Lots of roughage,LSA and natural liver cleansing foods. I cut out wheat, Gluten,sugar, salt....nearly everything! And stayed off it all for over two years hoping that that would cleanse out whatever bad foods were blocking me up.
I started drinking Psyllium husks mixed with water (ewwww) and Aloe vera juice (ewwww ewwwww) and various other 'miracle' cures but no joy. Looking back on this stage of my life i think i must not have been a very fun person to know. I was ashamed of my weight,ashamed of my body's behaviour and a bit crazy in the head about my eating habits. I was ABSOLUTELY determined that i could control what was happening to me (and change it) by sticking with the changed lifestyle plan.
By this stage i had seen at least one more doctor (i went to different doctors each time so that i could get an unbiased consultation) and had the same evaluation so i was SURE that it was something that i was doing wrong that was causing these issues.
I think that deep down i thought my body was punishing me for starving it for so many years in the past - seems like crazy talk now but thats what i thought.

Slowly the eating habits got more and more extreme-
I knew about irritable bowel syndrome and this seemed to tick a lot of the boxes about what was happening to me so i tried to incorporate the tricks for managing IBS into my lifestyle as well.
i ate lots of tuna and peas and LSA. LSA on everything! Heaps of it on breakfast, lunch and dinner.And lots of tuna. And lots of peas! i tried not to block myself up with any carbs but i still wasnt losing any weight or feeling any better.
I didnt like to see any of my old friends because i felt like a old worn out shell of the fun, life loving person that i had been.
I remember running into Manchild on the street during this time (us both dating other people at the time) and being MORTIFIED that he had seen me (AND it was that daggy period when sweat pants were actually COOL! Oh the shame!!!) bloated and blotchy skinned. He remembers the incident also and says he was mortified that i had ignored him and then he wondered if it was actually me because i looked and acted so differently than when he had last seen me.
He summed it up nicely. i felt like a was a completely different person than i used to be too.