Tag: chronic pain

Ten ways that help me get back to living after being extremely sick

I’ve been in and out of hospitals for close to thirty years. I’ve endured over thirty small bowel obstructions, ten severe pancreatitis attacks and over twenty surgeries. In between I’ve had to deal with many episodes where I’d been extremely sick even though I didn’t have to go to the hospital. And what occurred after each of these events is that I had to get back up. I had to claw my way back into everyday life. There isn’t much written about these dark times for people with chronic illness. What’s even talked about less is how do we get back to living. I found these ten things helpful in my recovery the last time I was sick. I’m still going through recovery and practicing most of these everyday. This time around I was sick for months due to a small bowel obstruction and two extremely severe pancreatitis attacks.

Recovery for me means getting back control over my body and mind after being nearly destroyed by the pain and fatigue of my chronic illnesses. When I’m sick I don’t feel like myself. I’m exhausted and I’m in horrific pain. So it helps to be able to do what I can to survive and then begin to thrive again. These are some things I found helpful this time around.

  1. Time Warping – The ability to jump over minutes or even hours without being aware of the passage of time and the sensations of pain and misery in the present moment.  So many people say we need to be in the moment. My question has always been, why the fuck do I want to be in the moment when I am in extreme agony? This time around I was laid up for months and I found that playing Star Craft II really helped me Time Warp. It allowed me to not think about my pain or how miserable I felt for at least 15 minutes or so at a time. Another way I like to Time Warp is by taking a bath. From drawing the bath to sitting in it, to getting out, drying off and putting on fresh clothes I can burn through 45 minutes to an hour. I also like to watch something on Netflix while I’m taking a bath, like Star Trek or Family Guy.  I also started playing around with small drones. Even when my pain was really bad I could reduce the awareness of it for those five or ten minutes I was flying the drone.  It requires full concentration to fly it. I highly recommend anyone pick one up who is sick or in pain.
  2. Exercising in small increments – As I began to feel better I started making myself pay for each game of Star Craft II I played. I wouldn’t allow myself to start a new game until I completed a push-up or some other exercise. I started out with just a single pushup between each game – which was a great struggle -and now I’m up to fifteen. I would also mix in shadow boxing or doing squats as well. Along with the push-ups I started walking five minutes at a time outside just to get the body moving. When I’m laid up I feel powerless. Moving and feeling my body getting physically stronger through strength training and walking more and more each day gives me a sense of mastery and control that is in short supply when I’m laid up and life is on hold.
  3. Listening to podcasts – The number one podcast I listen to is the Joe Rogan Experience. Joe is an amazing guy who is always upbeat, funny and has a hunger for knowledge. He has guests on that are focused on living life to the fullest and talks about living a healthy lifestyle. I also like Joey Diaz’s The Church of What’s Happening Now. This one is not for the faint of heart. But through all of the coarseness and language is some great lessons. One thing he said recently  has stuck with me and I’m adding it to my list today. It is advice he gave to his producer Lee Syatt – He told him  “Stick to something for a year. You don’t know where it will lead”. I don’t know about others with chronic illness but commitment and consistency are something I struggle with everyday.
  4. Sticking with something for a year – When I’m sick it’s hard for me to imagine even getting through another day let alone trying to imagine living another year. But this advice from Joey Diaz has helped me to focus my limited energy in a positive way. In the past I’ve started and stopped many endeavors and two business before they got up and running. Now I’m focused for the next 12 months on posting three blog entries per week. I’m also starting up a podcast this week to talk with doctors, people in the cannabis world and those who understand what it’s like to live with a chronic illness. When I’m sick I try to calculate what my return on effort will before I do something. Most of the time I don’t even start something or if I do I don’t stick with it for long,  because I’m unable to imagine a return on my energy that will be worth the misery, effort, and possible disappointment if I fail. But Joey Diaz’s advice reminds me that I can’t know what my actions today will produce in the future. The effort is not wasted if I’m doing something that I enjoy and that may be of benefit to others.
  5. Helping someone – When I’m sick I always feel like I’m a black hole of need. I suck in everything and nothing escapes. For those weeks or even months I’m relying on others for a lot. Being sick for close to 30 years now has been a huge strain on my family. They have been awesome so when I can start helping them in some small way I always feel better. One of the turning points for me this time around was when my nephew and niece came to see me. They are 5 and 4 and so full of life. I made them juice cups and small plate of food. They were very appreciative. It made me feel great. When I can help those I love it makes me feel stronger and it’s very motivating to continue improving.
  6. Opening up one piece of mail – When I’m sick and in bed the last thing I want to think about are hospital bills, insurance or some phone call I need to return. But these things add up. I will have a stack of envelopes I know I need to open  but I just let them pile up. Opening one letter and taking care of what’s inside is vital to my physical recovery. Not addressing the things necessary to continue livings adds extra emotional stress which translates into physical stress. I always feel better when I begin knocking out the bills and taking care of what I need to do, one envelope at a time.
  7. Cleaning something or picking something up –I have a tendency to allow my space to become overwhelmed with clothes papers and the mess of living when I’m sick. If I make myself pick up one thing I feel better. If I make myself take my plate and cup to the dishwasher I feel better. These little victories add up and I can see that I can still make a difference in the world even if it means just putting my clothes in the hamper. Also no matter how bad I feel I always shower and it never fails to help.
  8. Reaching out to someone – Being sick, in pain and alone is terrible. I’m fortunate to have two great brothers who are always reaching out to me. I will go weeks sometimes months without reaching out to them. Even if it’s just a simple text,  or a phone call, or commenting on an Instagram post, I feel better because I’m making the effort. One of the ways I know I’m getting better is when I ask my older brother out to lunch. We do this about three times a week when I’m in between feeling awful. So getting back into that routine is always helpful.
  9. Cooking a meal  – Cooking is a way to feed your body and your soul. It is also a creative act. When I’m ill I don’t feel very productive at all, because I’m not. Cooking something that will benefit me and my loved ones helps me to feel better. Recently I cooked Key West shrimp with butter and lemon on a sheet tray and some baked potatoes. It was almost zero prep time and not much clean up and it was extremely tasty and good for us.
  10. Getting outside – This time around has been one of the hardest of my life and I spent a lot of time inside. It’s the most time think I have spent inside since I was first diagnosed with Ulcerative Colitis at the age of twelve. Being inside physically and mentally limits my ability to visualize a better future. The same walls the same stupid crap on t.v., the horrible commercials all serve to limit possibilities. By going outside and reasserting that I am a part of the greater world of nature lifts my spirits. Even if it’s ten minutes in the sun, watering some flowers,  or walking barefoot in the grass I feel physically better. My mind is quiter as well. Hearing the birds, seeing the trees sway in the wind and watching the squirrels chase each other reassure me that life persists and that I am a part of this miraculous natural world.

Entering back into the world after a horrible bout of an illness or a surgery can be scary, depressing, and physically and emotionally painful. Recovering requires physical actions as well as a positive outlook. When I am in the depths of one of these attacks or recovering from surgery my thoughts trend to the negative. It feels as if they are physically generated.  I have a mental fog that overwhelms me when I don’t feel well. The pain and fatigue and inflammation create a physical change in my brain that I can feel. Time plus postive small actions done consistently and the love and support of my family, help to turn my negative physical state which directly improves my mental state. Only by doing positive physical actions, listening to positive podcasts, and helping others can I keep the fog away and begin thinking and planning for a better future.

I’m just past through the most difficult part of my recovery process this time around. It’s the transition point from being totally consumed with pain, fatigue and overall misery to being at a point where I can begin reassessing my life, making plans and thinking about acting upon them.  After going through all this pain, paying the thousands of dollars in medical bills, and being alone for so long, I emerge to see what state my life is truly in. This his can actually be my toughest stretch because I’m still physically weak and now I have my entire life to get back into order.

I’m still ill, I hurt everyday, I live with my mom, I’m currently not working, I don’t have a girlfirend. I’m starting again from the bottom like I’ve done so many times before. It feels like I’ve gone through all this just to have a lifetime of struggle, lonliness and pain ahead of me. But as time goes on I know I’ll enjoy life a little bit more everyday. I’ll  laugh more. I’ll begin making money again. I’ll get my own place. I’ll find someone to love and who loves me. I’ll seek out new experiences and be fully engaged in life once more.

I would like to hear what helps you recover after being knocked down by illness or surgery. I’m always looking for ways to improve my recovery process.

Living better one game of Star Craft II at a time.

Brad Miller

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Pancreatitis and Psoriasis How Grapefruit Juice helped me

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“Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.”
― Hippocrates

I hate grapefruit juice. I always have. But I drink it almost everyday now. The reason I force it down my gullet  is that it helps reduce the pain and severity of my pancreatitis attacks. When I feel my pancreas acting up which is almost daily now I start drinking grapefruit juice. There have been studies done on Grapefruit Juice extract that have shown it effective in reducing damage done during pancreatitis attack. There are also studies that show that Naringenin the main flavonoid in Grapefruit is also very anti-inflammatory.

When I drink Grapefruit Juice I immediately feel the result. I feel a “cooling” effect on the inflammation which I experience as swelling, pain and feeling sick, that is associated with the pancreatitis. The compounds in grapefruit juice are also thought to help stop the inflammatory cascade and lower cytokine production. This all leads to less inflammation and inflammation has been linked to heart disease, cancer, and for me psoriasis.

On top of having a pancreas that despises fat I’ve also had psoriasis for almost thirty years. I’ve not had a remission in my psoriasis since I first got it. It’s been a nightmare having it. I’ve tried creams and Enbrel. I had success with both but both require consistent life long applications with unknown long term side effects. I stopped using steroid creams because its impossible to put it on 75% of your body everyday and I stopped using Enbrel after I got pneumonia last year. I remember vowing to myself I would cure my psoriasis naturally about five years ago. I think I’m closer now than I’ve ever been.  I at first tried tons of different supplements but they didn’t work. The changes I’ve made recently are I’ve dropped 30 pounds, eaten a mostly primal diet, drink alkaline water and drink grapefruit juice everyday, and have seen spectacular results.

Another one of the benefits of consuming grapefruit juice is that Naringenin, the main flavonoid in the fruit, it has  been shown to help not only with easing inflammation but it also aides weight loss. I actually am trying to put on a few pounds now but in the past year I’ve dropped  thirty pounds of mostly fat over. I lost it mostly due to changing over to a mainly paleo diet.  I went hardcore at the beginning of February and lost the last ten pounds that have been plaguing me for ever. But the grapefruit juice does help keep the fat off. And keeping the fat off helps lower systemic inflammation in my  body.

Fat cells are linked to psoriasis and inflammation because they produce the hormone Leptin along with other factors. Leptin is a key hormone in the body that regulates everything from hunger to how much fat we store.  There have been studies done that show psoriasis patients have an increased level of leptin in the blood stream and many psoriasis patients are obese or overweight. I’ve gone from 172 pounds down to around 140. Almost 32 pounds of weight loss over the course of a year. Eating a standard american diet leads to leptin sensitivity which promotes inflammation and causes the body to store more fat. A study out of Taiwain speculated that in the future weight loss recommendations will be added to all psoriasis treatment protocols.

I prefer to drink organic red grapefruit juice because it also contains lycopene – white grapefruit juice doesn’t. I’ve also started adding a small pinch of himalayan sea salt to  each glass. This makes it taste better and provides additional minerals. Along with the grapefruit juice I’ve recently begun drinking Icelandic Glacial water due to its high ph of 8.5. I don’t know if it has helped with the psoriasis. Autoimmune issues and the inflammatory response are so complicated that its hard to say what is having an effect or if whether its the combination of the changes that are the key. My goal is to continue adding small steps to reduce my inflammation.

I have a lot of inflammation going on. When I was twelve I was diagnosed with Ulcerative Colitis. When I was 15 I got psoriasis extremely bad. I believe that my pancreatitis has an autoimmune cause as well. Anything that helps cool inflammation is vital to my living healthier and enjoying more of my life. Grapefruit juice is now a permanent part of my anti-inflammatory campaign.

Before trying grapefruit juice or grapefruit extract it is recommended that you talk to your physician because it can interfere with many medications.

Please leave a comment if you’ve tried grapefruit juice for pancreatitis or if you’ve lost weight and seen a decrease in the severity of your psoriasis. Also I would like to know what you think about Alkaline water.

Wishing you a healthier today and a better tomorrow
Brad Miller

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http://www.webmd.com/skin-problems-and-treatments/psoriasis/news/20081215/fat-hormone-linked-psoriasis

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18503517

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16579728

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/03/130305145145.htm

 

 

Medical Freedom

When we give government the power to make medical decisions for us, we in essence accept that the state owns our bodies.”
― Ron Paul

Human health is the human experience. It is both a cause and an effect. When we feel better we do more, and when we are able to accomplish more we feel better. Illness is one the ways that affects our health but also the many restrictions, laws and the very structure of our medical cartel that runs health care in this country inflicts additional pain and suffering that is totally unnecessary.

Medical Freedom is simply human freedom expressed in the production and consumption of products and services that improve human health. Laws, government regulations, employer insurance schemes, medical licensing, the FDA and all the various other means of restricting consensual exchange between individuals for the purposing of “feeling better” and “living longer” has created a ridiculously expensive and overwhelming complex system that punishes the very people its been sold to help, sick people.

I have been in and out of hospitals for the past 28 years. I have personal experience with chronic pain, surgery and the ever encroaching hand of government in my health care decisions. I reject the need of politicians and so called experts that benefit by commoditizing my suffering. That has to stop. Whenever anyone talks of “healthcare” you should be suspicious. What is lacking in all of these debates is the term getting healthier or feeling better. We don’t talk about “hunger care” when discussing farmers growing food.

Medical laws were created in this country and were sold as a way to “protect” people like me. When in reality all it has done is to make my life more difficult when merely living is extremely difficult. One example is the management of chronic pain. Reporters and politicians, police officers, district attorneys and others involved in the addiction, prison or pharma industry are in the news all the time talking about the scourge of opioid use. I have taken literally thousands of pain pills in my life and I continue to take them because I hurt a lot. I am eternally grateful for opioid pain pills. If they didn’t exist I would have killed myself when I was 12 or I would have died due to shock to all the pain caused by the bowel obstructions and most recently the horrific pain of pancreatitis.

Pain pills or pain medicine are derived from the poppy plant. It is simply a plant that miraculously creates a substance that provides pain relief. It is truly remarkable. I should be able to grow poppies in my garden and make poppy tea which humans have been doing for thousands of years. But instead I need a permission slip from a government licensed health consultant (doctor) and go to a pharmacy that has the pills on the shelf locked up behind a counter. Not only do I have to get the permission slip I now have to deal with state law on top of federal law in concert with restrictions by the insurance company. And on top of all this my personal information is now in a government database. I never consented to have my information accessed by the government for my “protection”. This is a clear violation of the 4th amendment.

What madness is this? It all boils down to the fundamentals of human freedom. The question every person, especially those who are chronically sick need to ask themselves: do you own your own body and your mind? Our system, the government, the big pharma companies, the DEA, the FDA, the police, and the licensing boards all believe you do not. It is set up to usurp your self-ownership and farm it out to your doctor, your pharmacy, drug companies and the alphabet soup of government divisions.

I believe that I own my body and my mind and that I have an inherit right to ingest whatever substances I choose to in order to feel better and live longer. I will not be right all the time. Life is inherently dangerous and I will always have limited knowledge when making choices. This also applies to the so called experts as well. Science is open ended. The current medical system is set up to convince you that they have all the answers and they are omnipotent when it comes to which drugs which are good and which are “bad”.

The entire prescription / pharmaceutical / FDA / DEA /Medical college system  is a cartel set up to allow the sale of dangerous drugs which would never be allowed if the FDA didn’t rubber-stamp them. If we didn’t have an FDA then companies would be totally at the mercy of internet reviews, independent analysis of their drugs and would be liable for killing people just like anyone else who sells a dangerous product.

Right now their liability is limited. They get the FDA rubber stamp and this allows them to rake in huge profits until the dangerous side effects begin killing and injuring people. By the time the lawsuits roll in they have already made a hundred times what it will cost them  to settle the lawsuits. And drugs like Cannabis, MDMA, psilocybin, and DMT are illegal even though they have been show to be extremely safe and more beneficial then what they are peddling.

Medical Freedom isn’t something we talk about because the debate is always about access to “healthcare”. When is the last time you heard a politician talk about individuals becoming healthier? They don’t. They simply want more and more people in the healthcare system. The same government that designs the road system, the tax system, the public education system and the wars across the world are the same people designing and implementing our “healthcare system”.

Why is it that the more government fails the more people want from it? The food pyramid debacle is the perfect example of what the true priorities are for the government and its corporate partners. Many experts now blame the food pyramid and the low fat scam as part of the massive rise in diabetes and metabolic syndrome.

Food is a massive part of living a healthy life and the government purposely funded studies and supported research that showed sugar was good and that we should all be eating tons of wheat, corn and soy. And you know who receives massive subsidies from the government? You would be right if you said soy, corn, wheat and sugar producers.

Medical Freedom is the concept that you have the right to make choices devoid of corrupt government and corporate entities who want to treat sick people like a commodity. Medical Freedom simply means exercising your sovereignty over your body and your mind. Prescription Drugs should all be legalized as well as so called illegal drugs. Pharmaceutical companies will have to survive the legal challenges and the public review process along with the private entities that will emerge to test the validity of their claims.

I believe that once the FDA is stripped of their power of appointing which pharmaceutical company will reap billions of dollars in profits, the focus will turn from treating “diseases” and the chronically ill as a commodity to treating the chronically ill as human beings and treating the whole individual.

It is time to reclaim our right to go into a store and buy what we choose without the government, academics, people in white coats or who have a badge on their chest deem necessary. In a world in which Medical Freedom is respected we would still seek out health consultants and follow treatment recommendations. But the parent/child paradigm between the government and the ill would end. The consumer would be the one in control and have the ultimate say. And if you didn’t want to have a health consultant you would be free to follow a treatment program you see fit.

We’ve been lied to about Cannabis as a medicine by the government. The NIH actually holds two patents on cannabinoids that they list as effective for treating over ten different diseases and symptoms. The idea that the DEA who is financially incentivized to keep Cannabis a schedule 1 drug is criminal. The time to reassert our right to Medical Freedom as a natural expression of our innate rights due to our self-ownership as a human individual.

I’m struggling now with idiopathic pancreatitis. I’ve had this pain for decades but it went undiagnosed until the last few years. They are not sure why I have it or what we can do to prevent it from destroying my pancreas. I’m exploring having stem cell therapy to reverse the disease process. I should have the right to try what a majority of doctors might seem as dangerous or unproductive if I deem it to be a worthwhile risk.

Every decision we make is personal. When we are sick we don’t need the force of government involved to limit what are choices are in finding what we believe will be the most effective treatment for us to feel better and live longer. It doesn’t matter whether its vaporizing Cannabis, ignoring the food pyramid or trying experimental treatments that are now are considered dangerous or foolish but in the future could very well become the standard for care.

When you are sick you do not need artificial laws limiting your choices and limiting your access to natural, safe and effective plants and chemicals that have a chance to help individuals feeling better and living a longer life. Pain, inflammation and disease are terrible and life altering. I want every politician to know, every drug maker, and every one who seeks to commoditize my suffering that I am a human being who owns himself and I demand my Medical Freedom! I call all of those who are suffering with chronic illness to do the same.

Brad Miller