I'm back from the gym now.
Booty is still bleeding, but I made it through my workout anyway. (I keep a stash of incontinence pads in my gym bag and they've come in very handy the past couple of days!)
Rainbow, if you can find that prescription, particularly if it's amitritpyline or nortriptyline, I'd recommend you give it a shot. It should be inexpensive - amitriptyline is a generic and it's less than $5 a month for me. I believe nortriptyline is a generic too, it's a very similar medication, and should be inexpensive as well. If it's amitriptyline, take it at bedtime as it'll make you sleepy. It should hopefully prevent some/most of your migraines, and it may help your digestive issues or it may not. Nortriptyline shouldn't make you drowsy so you can take it whenever, and likewise it should help prevent the migraines and may help with the guts. If you still have that prescription & it's still valid, it's worth a shot. I adore amitriptyline, I haven't had a migraine in... gosh, I can't even remember how long it's been, maybe close to a year! And I sleep great most of the time thanks to it's mild sedative effect. It hasn't done a thing for my guts, but you can't win 'em all, right?
Tablets are wonderful things, I have a 1st generation Kindle Fire myself. I will say, get a tablet with a proper keyboard, as typing on the screen on my Kindle is like typing on a phone - slow, with lots of errors/spell check changes a lot of things, and it's just generally very annoying to type on it (I don't have a smartphone but I understand it's very similar, typing on a phone screen or on a kindle screen). It is great, however, for taking into the bathroom with me.
My kindle is my bathroom buddy, I can check my facebook and read and play Angry Birds and whatever else from that lovely little thing.
The current generation of Kindle Fire isn't very expensive, either - my niece is getting a Fire for xmas, and I know it was $139, which is quite cheap compared to the price of a new laptop.
My hubby steals my wet wipes too! In fact, I had to tell him to stop, and I had to hide my refills! One day I went to grab a wet wipe from my dispenser, and they were all gone!! Oh, I was so mad. I told him, there are certain things I *need*, and wet wipes are one of them. I know he still sneaks one from time to time but he's not using them up blatantly like he used to since I yelled at him.
I really feel for you guys who are overweight, it is apparently such a convenient excuse for bad doctors to blame every single symptom/illness on the person being overweight. IBD can affect anyone, IBD'ers can be any weight, being overweight doesn't cause that type of symptom. I've always been thin myself - I'm 5'8" and my "healthy" weight is about 136 lbs. When I got sick, I dropped down to 115 and I was getting close to being scary-skinny, but some doctors (particularly at my local urgent care clinic) still insisted things were all in my head, I just have IBS and I need to deal with stress better, I'm depressed and I just need an antidepressant, etc. So the lame excuses don't end even when you're starting to look emaciated, sadly. But I imagine it must be even worse if you're overweight, as you don't "look" sick (who does with an invisible illness though?). What crappy treatment, no pun intended. I hope once you iron out insurance and all that fun stuff, that you can find a doctor who takes you really seriously and isn't quick to blame everything on your weight (or on IBS, depression, etc). It's insulting and untrue to blame such serious symptoms on stuff like that.
This reminds me, I had a roommate in college who was overweight and she had asthma. She also kept losing her inhaler, so I had to take her to the ER a couple of times so that she could be treated for acute asthma attacks. At one ER visit, she was sitting there wheezing and waiting for them to do the nebulizer thing on her, and the nurse was lecturing her, "You would feel better if you lose some weight!" And I was like, okay, but right now she'll feel better if you treat her so that she doesn't die.
Sure, being overweight can cause some health issues, and maybe her asthma would improve if she lost weight, but come on - at that moment a lecture was not the thing she needed, she needed a nebulizer so that she could, you know, breathe!
Night sweats - yep, that sounds just like me, except I get hot sweats more than cold sweats. In a bad flare, I'll wake up absolutely soaked, my pajamas are soaked and so are my sheets. When it first happened, I was like, WTF, did I wet the bed? It took me awhile to realize it was sweat, there was so much of it, it didn't even seem possible that it could be sweat! Nowadays, if I suspect I'm going to have night sweats, I'll sleep on a towel and will set out a spare pair of pajamas so that I can change in the middle of the night without waking hubby.
The liver - yes, alcohol is for sure metabolized in the liver, I'm not sure about caffeine - I avoid caffeine at all costs because it triggers my migraines, even with the amitriptyline. That's the one big migraine trigger I've found, even "decaf" tea will set me off. I can only have herbal caffeine-free tea (I've learned that caffeine-free means caffeine-free, whereas "decaf" means there's still some caffeine in it, just less caffeine than regular). I don't have alcohol very often, maybe a small glass of wine once every few months or so, just because alcohol is so hard on my stomach. But yeah, Tylenol is metabolized in the liver, and since my liver is already screwy, I just try to avoid that stuff for the most part. Your OD on Tylenol sounds scary! Too much Tylenol and you can shut your liver down completely, it's scary stuff really. But still, from an IBD perspective, it is safer for us than NSAIDs. NSAIDs, even in normal recommended doses, can cause gut inflammation and bleeding ulcers and all kinds of awful stuff. I was taking a lot of ibuprofen right before I got sick - we were kayaking a lot and I took ibuprofen to counter the muscle soreness. Never again - now when I work out, I'm happy to deal with the soreness!
