MAR 26, 2006

OF CHEMISTRY AND GYMS

What a difference a week makes. 

As mentioned in the last post, things weren’t going so well.  The following Friday, I stayed home from work, which, frankly, takes a lot.  I felt like a zombie.  A nauseated zombie with a burning pain in his rectal area.

A trip to the doctor’s office yielded a diagnosis of “angry” hemorrhoids and a fissure, and a prescription of a steroid cream and the person-in-pain’s best friend, Vicodin. 

Aaah, Vicodin.  That’s the stuff.  Kills the pain, sure, but makes you really zombie-like.  This is not a “take two and call me in the morning” sort of drug; it’s more of a “take two and hope you wake up, Sleeping Beauty” thing.  The cream, meanwhile, soothed the soreness temporarily, but seemed mostly ineffectual. 

The following Monday, I got a fresh dose of Remicade, elixir of the colon gods, but before it kicked in, I endured an interesting week with ass and head equally abuzz.  The ’rhoids persisted, and walking was still a chore.  (In case you’re wondering precisely how it feels to have really nasty inflammation down there, and wish to experience it for yourself in hopes of empathizing with the Crohn’s-afflicted, here’s a fun way to replicate the sensation at home: Go to your local hardware store and purchase a small piece of sandpaper [a couple of inches square should do the trick].  Using a small tool such as a wrench, which you can also buy at your hardware store, wedge the sandpaper into your rectal area.  Keep in clenched in there as you go for a walk.  Repeat every day for three days.)

Anyway.  By Friday, the Remicade kicked in, I stopped the Vico-brain-scrambling-din, and suddenly, amazingly, felt great.  It probably also helped that during the course of that week, I also went on the “don’t mix with alcohol or your colon falls out drug,” the “makes you strong and turns your complexion into a pimply alligator” drug, the “here, this will heal your rectum but by the way you have to shove it up your already inflamed ass to get it there” drug and the “this’ll help your energy level but, oops, it makes you constipated” drug.  I was a walking chemistry experiment, which I suppose is better than being a walking physics experiment (er, wait, I have braces, so that, too). 

But chemistry is a wonderful, and that combination had an amazing effect.  I pulled a quasi-Lazarus, going from feeling like the living dead to feeling, well, what I suspect is normal for most people.  I wouldn’t know about that, personally.  But I don’t feel sick anymore. 

To celebrate, I did something that is either brilliant or incredibly stupid.  I joined the gym. 

Now, I always feel better when I exercise; it seems to calm things down, both immediately and over the long term.  Exercise is good.  You should exercise daily.  It makes the Surgeon General very happy.  But sometimes, many times, most times, it’s tough to commit to a long-term regimen of exercise when you have a chronic disease such as Crohn’s. 

First of all, when you have the energy level of a sloth on tranquilizers, it’s hard to get motivated to go to the gym.  Second, let’s consider the options at your typical gym, such as the one for which I just signed up.

Swimming.  A great opportunity to show off your physique.  Which, in my case, includes enough surgical scars in the abdominal area to roughly replicate a highway map.  Think I’ll pass on that opportunity.

Yoga.  Finally, a chance to contort yourself into all kinds of crazy positions even when you’re not trying to fight off abdominal cramps!  But what if I get stuck when I tie myself in a knot, and suddenly have to use the bathroom?  Also, I think most people with Crohn’s have some sort of secret method of stretching when they’re bloated to pass that painful gas, and I somehow don’t think it would go over very well with the perky instructor with a negative waist size if I inadvertently nailed that position during class and provided my own percussion to go with the Enya in the background.  No, I’d better skip that, too.

Climbing wall.  As previously discussed, anything involving a waist harness and complex knots is generally a bad idea for those who often need to get the bathroom quickly.

Weight machines.  OK, maybe.  But you know that one that involves sitting on a bench and using your thighs to lift weights via some contraption that requires that you open and close your legs in a very adult-audiences-only way?  Builds the muscles, sure, but when you’re working your legs like a bellows, there’s always a danger that something will, in fact, bellow out. 

Treadmill.  All of the jostling of real running, but without any nearby bushes to deal with the consequences of that jostling!  How can you go wrong? 

Rowing Machine.  With all that rocking and pushing and pulling and scraping of the rear on distressingly hard seat, if you don’t have hemorrhoids when you start, you will by the time you’re done. 

The fact is, there’s not a lot to do at the gym that is convenient to the bathroom and gentle to the abdominal and surrounding areas. 

Oh, wait.  There is a hot tub.  That sounds nice.