Ok, so this is addressing part of why I’ve had such a crazy month upon returning home from Europe and touch a little bit on a personal update (I’ll hit part 2 and 3 later) but yes, you read that title right! Spanish flu!
Well…not really…but a pretty nasty bug that my family picked up in Spain! We came to calling it the spanish flu because that’s where my dad first got it before passing it to my mom, brother in law, and myself. My sister was the only one who escaped unscathed.
Now as you may recall I had my tonsils out about 6 weeks prior to contracting this virus and my body functions were still very much affected by that slow recovery. My immune system was NOT at all working at peak capacity (especially after 3 weeks in Europe) and while everyone else threw the bug in a little over a week, mine hung on. A long time. I got bronchitis and had to go on antibiotics, but it still wasn’t over. I was coughing so badly that I sometimes literally was gasping for breath, and the spot where my tonsils used to be was inhabited by these horrible blister looking things. I had no voice, a terrible sinus infection and ear infection, and was not sleeping because I couldn’t stop coughing.
Sooooooo…second round of antibiotics! Yipee! This time, they hit it with the big guns, an extremely powerful antibiotic 3 times a day. The doc had me prep with 2 days of a probiotic and then take a double dose of probiotic for the whole round of antibiotics. In addition, I kept taking my acid reducer and digestive enzyme. But still, the antibiotic hit me hard.
Like really hard. It was pretty much 2 weeks of vomiting and the worst diarrhea ever.
So a couple days ago I finally finished the antibiotics (yay!) and my sickness was obliterated (double yay!!) but the battlefield that was my stomach is a micro-organism ghost town (insert dramatic music here). We’re talking no survivors post apocalyptic nuclear war style! Yay for embarrassing farts, shits, and stomach cramps.
Now you’re probably wondering why I’m sharing all of this TMI information. Well, I feel like this is a prime time to focus on self care and on healing my gut through the foods I eat and returning it to normal and health function. This is a prime time to symbolically take care of my body and be gentle to it and nourish it through food. This is not a time to binge, purge, restrict, coffee-load, or any other high impact high stress disordered activity.
This is an opportunity to be mindful and listen to my body and work with it for what it needs.
Sounds Like Somewhere 