Candice Curtis & Crohns Disease: Whilst I've been away from blogging....

Monday, 10 January 2011

Whilst I've been away from blogging....

One thing I will mention whilst I am on-line at the moment, is my new found love for Photoshop, namely CS4. Whilst having to rest I also had to be running my equestrian business for an income and during this time I decided to start to learn Photoshop to help myself keep my advertising costs to zero.....So I went about learning Photoshop..... properly and thank god for Youtube! Fantastic tutorials on everything and anything you want.... more about other tutorials later... Photoshop and some of the other programmes in the Master Collection Suite 4 from Adobe are super fantastic! I am on a learning curve with a few of the programmes at the moment but Photoshop lead the way as you can produce so much of want you want in this programme.

I will jump ahead in my training development and speak a little about transforming myself into an AVATAR! As you can see from my background picture it turned out quiet well!

Here is a clear picture of my finished AVATAR.

AVATAR Candice!

I have the various steps I took to get to this picture

if anyone is interested let me know and I will add them for you to see!

I may even make my own video for YouTube... you never know!

Comments will help me decide!

The above AVATAR was my second attempt.

Here is my first...

which do you prefer?

AVATAR Candice first attempt

I have mentioned all of this because:-

Firstly it will explain the background picture to my blog!
Secondly one of the main things I have learnt whilst I have been healing my self back to health, is that creativity 'does' make you happy, it allows your inner self to breathe. When you are concentrating on your creative project at hand, your mind is blank and your ego is at it's lowest vibration. You are expressing your inner connection and the effects of this is the inner peace that fills you and floods you with an inner joy that brightens up your day with every further step of achievement gained. No matter what your medium I certainly recommend taking some time at least a few times a week. To just STOP.

STOP what you are doing

STOP talking to those around you

STOP and be with your self ....

STOP and be in silence......

STOP and listen to your breathing........

STOP and listen to the world around you

STOP and look at the veins in the leaves, not the leaves on the trees

STOP thinking and munching back over scenarios and made up problems

STOP thinking and role playing and repeatedly analysing

STOP thinking and complaining and blaming

JUST

STOP

Once you've mastered how to STOP life becomes rosie, as if tinted through love spectacles! Seriously! Wouldn't you rather see life through the eyes of happiness and joy no matter what your current situation around you holds? Well, learning how to STOP is the beginning of a long long process of self development. I will be talking more about all of this in future posts but for now, if you have something you love to do that is creative, whether you enjoy cooking, gardening, reading (which in turn means you truly must have a go at writing for your self!) art, dancing, design, cloths making, photography (come on.... we are all photographers!) We all love taking photos, so play around with them in a programme you find easy to use and see what you can create! Whilst times are hard these types of presents not only save your bank balance but they are more cherished and thought highly of than anything you can buy. Something you put your creative loving touch to will be worth more than it's weight in gold to the receiver. Remember that!

So as you can see the list for your creativity is endless, whether you like making mud castles or recycled art from your weekly garbage, if you feel it and think you can create it, get on with it!!

Procrastination is the root of so many failures in our lives.

Think about it...

How many 'IF only's' do you have floating around in your head?

On that note I will love you and leave you.

It's time for me to STOP now!

Good night!

XCX

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From diagnosis to now.

This needs to be updated as it was written at the time the blog was started....
My crohns diagnosis - 14 years ago I suffered over 1.5 years with increasing stomach cramps far worse than the worst of a normal person, then the 2nd 6 months, I spent most days and nights in pure agony and was sick all the time. Gradually I was being sick 20 times a night with the last 10 - 15 times being just bile. The weirdest thing was that when I was being sick i didn't have any pain! So I almost looked forward to being sick just to alleviate the pain! During this time (and for a good few years afterwards) I was taking a huge amount of strong painkillers, I was living on them. The next 6 months preceded with less sickness but with pain that was much more server than the initial year. During this time (1.5 yrs) I saw my family GP and a few others and they all said you have irritable bowl syndrome and take some peppermint oil or other similar stupid comments. No-one doing any tests, most not even touching my stomach to investigate! Finally after I had been screaming in bed for 2 weeks my dad called the doctor to come out, however they refused and told me to come in, again to my GP. He sent me to see a specialist as he thought it was my appendix - that it was going to burst (This comment had been a bit of a floater in comments from doctors that it could be my appendix at various times but the pain would be moving or doing something uncharacteristic to appendicitis). He decided I would need an operation immediately and the surgeon saw me. He said to me that it wasn't the appendix, that it was something else and it had to be operated on immediately. They removed lots of my intestine's both large and small as they were swollen to the size of very large oranges. After the op' they told me I had Crohns Disease and that there was no known cause of it, it is not infectious and that it is not curable! They said that the symptoms shouldn't return for at least 2 years as no other patient has had it return in that period if they have had an op'. They also said that if I didn't have the op' I would have been dead in 2 days! So I was saved and given a life of no hope. This was when I was diagnosed, they missed all the for ground work and made me get to the point of having to 'need' an operation and then they tell me there is no hope and I'm to lead a life of pain and suffering! Nice eh! I mean morphine didn't even really help me with the pain when I was in the hospital after the op', recovering. This op' happened when I was 18, luckily in one sense for me I've always had a gift to look healthy, no one could see that i was dying then and in the years that followed. So, back to the story..... unfortunately for me my symptoms came back after only 2 months, with vengeance! Hardly enough time to even recover let alone start fighting again. So they stuck me on strong steroids (prednisone, azathiropine, Budesinide to name but not correctly spell, but a few!). Over the next few years I was given more and more drugs that were killing off other parts of my body - my bone marrow for one. I was so skinny and worse... frail, I felt that if some one where to hit my arm it would snap. Not a nice feeling since i've always been a strong little cookie! Anyway over the years things did slowly get worse although at the time there where intervals that made me feel as if things were in remission for a while. I got to a point about 6/7 years ago when I felt I wanted to know how I would be without these killer drugs that I "could never come off." (I had been told that some of these drugs where for life and that I could never come off them) So I tried without, I took a year to ween myself off the various drugs and I tried from then on without any drugs. It was the same time that my grandfather noticed that most pain killers say 'not for crohns patients' within their paper work. So I stopped all drugs and I survived ok, although I was in fact still walking down the path to my inevitable demise. During the time of the op' I had already started experimenting with drugs, the occasional spliff etc.. At some point during the time of still taking the painkillers I noticed that the spliff had more effect than any amount of painkiller. So from that moment in time I continued to use spliffs more and more to help control the pain I was in every minute of every day. Over the years that followed I wasn't conscious about the amount of pain I was in as I'd been living with it and fighting and trying to move forwards with it for so long that it was a part of me. However my life had moved up in speed over the years, racing as best as I could against time. I had suffered for the first 3 years after the op' with the fear and worry and depression that I was living on borrowed time and at any moment it might get snapped away from me. As a young girl this was tough but as usual I accepted things and carried on the best I could. Thinking that this wouldn't have been given to me and I wouldn't have been saved if I couldn't cope. So cope I did. The April flair up wasn't really a.... flair up like I mentioned at the time. It was the end of the road. From the end of 2006 I had started to slow down as I felt the end was near. However my slowing down was only stopping the physical aspect of my life - riding and the such (basically over the last 12 years I have been made to stop riding, through the pain becoming too immense, many times and for long periods as well.) The speed at which I was living at, thinking at and functioning at was, looking back at it, like a super hero speed! So I (in case you hadn't realized I'm not a hypochondriac and I will never let it be known how much i'm suffering - it's just the way i am.) Anyway so I went on holiday jan 07, to try to get a little bit more time on my side - e.g resting on holiday is supposed to refresh you and I hoped it would give me more time as I could feel that it was running out. So by the time I realized that I wasn't going to be able to cure this episode by just resting. I decided to start the blog as I thought if I can get out of this one then it's worth documenting. However I only got to write those few days in april and then I had to stop. Doctors orders! The rest of this year has been been very intense. By the time I actually went to see the doc' (I'd had his number for over a year and had not gone to see him - When I took myself off my drugs I wanted to know what life would be like without them but I had great intentions to try out natural therapies, Chinese, herbs etc.... however this never happened as I was 'coping'. So I had to get to a point where I was 'laughing in the face of death' (by this I mean that I was still in such high spirits and I could feel death was knocking at my door but I was still able to laugh and say " finally i'm at a place where I now can heal myself" and I was finally ready to seek out help, ready both mentally and physically.) As I said this year has been very intense, I can truly say there are a hell of a lot more pain thresholds than i knew existed and to be able to 'feel' your body healing itself, taking you back through the damage in reverse is truly enlightening and painful! It is only now through the healing process that I have understood where i've been, on the road to and from death. In comparison to many other crohns suffers over the years I have always had a more server version - typical, can't do things by half's miss extremist!

However where i'm at at the moment - the doctor cured the energy blockage that was caused by the initial trauma that caused crohns which means the cause of the crohns is gone and now all i have to do is allow the body to heal. This happened a few months ago and I'm doing well, i'm still not well but i will be soon, i'm about 85 - 90% there but this last bit is holding on to make sure than I come back into life, after this healing and maintain the slower paced life and all the things I have learnt. Otherwise i probably would try to over do it again as thats all I've known since i was diagnosed with crohns and before - upbringing. So there has been and still is a lot of re programming of my brain, my way of life has had to completely change and sometimes i still resort back to the old me which i have to notice and then change before i get a reaction from my body! It's all very interesting, how intelligent our bodies are. I will be filling in the experiences of my healing from April to now, within the blog postings over the next few months, as I'm still resting.