Today was a great day!  It is one of those days were the Gastroparesis symptoms were limited and I was able to be quite productive at work.  My brain was on fire and working like it used to.  These types of days are becoming few and far between so I make sure to celebrate them when they come.

As I mentioned in a previous blog (https://adventureswithgastroparesis.com/2013/02/09/firing-on-all-cylinders/), you know that these lucid times are limited.  You hope that they last for days or, if you are really lucky, weeks.  The only thing that you can predict with Gastroparesis is that there is an end to the number of lucid days.  I wrote about this recently, so I don’t want to use today’s blog to repeat the same.  Today I want to focus more on pacing yourself.

It is so easy to shorten the window you have by pushing yourself to fit too many things in before the Gastroparesis alarm goes off.  It is a constant balancing act.  You must balance completing as many things as you can while you are lucid with burning yourself out too early.  This is why you must “keep calm & pace yourself”.

This sounds much easier than it is.  Days like today give you a taste of what your life was like before the cramping, before the vomiting, before the brain fog, before the depression.  It is extremely difficult to not turn a blind eye to Gastroparesis in these moments and pretend that you are “normal”.  However, if you turn a blind eye, you will surely crash and have worse symptoms than you would otherwise.  So even though you are celebrating the day and celebrating a moment of “normalcy” you still have a nagging thought in the back of your mind reminding you to pace yourself.  It tells you that you can’t overdo it.  It tells you that you don’t want to risk having the next flair start earlier than you need to.  It tells you that you don’t want to move off of your eating plan and land yourself in the Emergency Room.

This means that I will celebrate today, but I will listen to the GP voice in my head that says my body is still not ready.  My body still needs to rest and recovery from my two week flair that just ended.  So tonight will involve relaxing with a castor oil pack instead of a turn at the spin bike!

~Millie