2020: the year that changed my life forever. Part 8: thank you all

 Dear readers,

in conclusion I would like to express my deepest gratitude to all the people who have helped me through this terrible period:

- First of all, I would like to thank the most important person in my life, my mother, who has always been there for me. In the most difficult moments, we established a 24/7 Skype connection and although we rarely directly addressed the problems I was having, she helped me a lot in many different ways. I also want to thank my sister who, with her helpfulness, kindness and positive energy, helped me cope with my difficult situation.

- A huge thank you goes to my father as well, who not only was always available for me online, but also decided to drive all the way to Germany to visit me and helped me out with various practical issues here at home.

- My best friend Emanuela has always been there for me, no matter how busy or stressed she is, and has given me precious advice and support and shown understanding. Her energy and determination gave me the necessary strength to face all the problems I was having.

- My Italian friends Stefano, his wife Silvia and Francesca, Marco and Usha, have also helped me in their own way, with their kind words and their time spent on Skype or WhatsApp.

- My superior at work has always been very kind and ready to help and arranged exams and events in such a way that would not cause me any discomfort. She was also able to accompany me to the doctor for the colonoscopy.

- I would also like to thank all those people who have spent time with me on Skype or WhatsApp on a language exchange. These conversations helped me a lot to keep my thoughts under control and also practice my French and Spanish. None of these people even knew anything about my condition.

- Last but not least, I would like to thank all the people who have been reading my blog in the last weeks and following my story. 

Thank you so much.

Andrew

2020: the year that changed my life forever. Part 7: lessons learned

 Dear readers,

No one can tell what the future may bring and it's no use blaming oneself for things which are out of one's control. What have I learned from this terrible experience? Here are some lessons learned:

- I will surely be more careful with my diet! I have learned a lot about nutrition and food and I am going to write a post about that soon.

- Even the best systems have their faults and failures: mistakes are made by experts and specialists and we are the ones who pay the price. As more people who work in health care have told me, once they find out that there's nothing physically wrong with you, they very often discharge you and then you are left alone in a world where there are too few good people who have to take care of an increasing mass of lost souls. You must find your own way, and although friends and family can help a lot, the most important form of support comes from inside you.  

- Even in the worst of times, there are good and positive things happening to you and around you. Something that helped me a lot was to make a list of good things that I had experienced despite or even thanks to my condition and, believe it or not, I managed to write quite a few. I really recommend that all of you should do that: try to write a list of good things that happened to you in 2020 (things you've learned to do, aims you have achieved, etc.). I am sure your list will be as long if not longer than mine.

- Maybe one of the worst experiences I had was to have to be a different person, to behave differently from how I normally would, to have to renounce to my usual daily activities, to have to suppress my thoughts. I am the way I am and I actually love my life. When I was a teenager I used to really hate myself, but then I learned to love myself by identifying the many advantages of my complex personality. Last year, when I realised that my thoughts were causing problems, I had to find a way to suppress them to prevent symptoms, and it worked, but I then realized that that is not the right solution. In fact, these thoughts represent who and how I am and now that the relationship between my digestion organs and mind is healthy again, I have taken an important decision: I am not going to suppress my thoughts anymore, however they are. Of course, I now often think about my condition, my nutrition and other issues connected to my experience. If maybe some of my symptoms persist because of that, well, so be it.      

- What are the real causes of all the problems I had? Well, surely it's not just the infection I caught in March 2020 and definitely it is not something in me. Very often it is the world outside, our society that takes us places we don't want to go to and makes us think and do things we don't want to think and do. That's why it is so important to have a functioning health system, experts and specialists that can understand and have time for their patients. Those who carry the most responsibility are the media. During the whole pandemic, loads of people have developed mental disorders like depression or chronic anxiety, not because of the virus itself, but because of the influence of the media, with their negative attidude, their fake news, their blind ambition, their inappropriate behaviour. I honestly think that if in the media we had less chaos and more organization, less news and more information, fewer lies and more honesty, less indifference and more empathy, less contempt and more respect, we would be able to not only prevent a lot of problems but also really save lives.

In the next and last post I will thank all the people who have helped me through this very difficult period.

Thank you all.

Andrew

2020: the year that changed my life forever. Part 6: a slow recovery

 Dear readers,

things started to improve very slowly. I basically had to teach my stomach how to digest food again. In fact, I suppose I actually lost more weight during those critical weeks than anytime before. Nevertheless, thanks to the fact that I had no psychosomatic episodes anymore, I managed to cope better with my critical physical condition.

Indeed, after a first difficult period, in January 2021 things started going better. However, the healing process has been really very slow since then and it will take a long time before the symptoms go away completely. In fact, I believe some of them will accompany me for the years to come. The nutritionist had also clearly said to me: "Don't think that you will ever be able to go back to the diet and regime you had before". Just to give you an example, last time I felt full and satiated was before everything started, more than a year ago. Since then, whenever I have a meal, the only thing I feel in case I should eat too much (hardly ever happens now) is a slight feeling in my throat or at the back of my mouth. Before, I used to feel a full stomach after a meal, but that feeling hasn't fully come back to me yet. For a long time I just felt a slight circle around my waist, as if the food would deposit itself there. Also, acid has become a constant part of my life. As they say, if you can't beat them join them, so I am trying to get used to all this. However, things are really improving and I hope that by the end of the year most symptoms will have disappeared.

What does my life look like now? Well, in terms of daily routine, even much better than before: I do all the things I used to do before, plus others as well. Indeed, I try to carry on with all the new activities I started in 2020: colouring, language exchanges in Spanish and French, playing games on my Xbox, and for the moment also piano classes! The course will end in July and I won`t continue in September, but I`ll definitely take single private classes now and again in the next years.

What about my thoughts? Well, I am again the person I used to be: my mind is active 24/7, as usual, and whatever thoughts I have, they don't have any influence on my psychological state, my physical state or my digestion. Andrew Pecchia is back! 

As for my diet, food and eating habits, everything has changed: first of all, I take quite a long time for every meal. Before March 2020, I used to eat quite a lot in a very short time but since then a meal lasts at least an hour. I also only eat what I cook and prepare at home. I stick to my diet and have not had any takeaway food or eaten out for a long time. I don't think I want to change that. Maybe I`m still afraid of any symptoms coming back, but for now, better safe than sorry. 

Well, I've now reached the end of this long story, but of course it's far from over: as I have already mentioned, although things have improved a lot, some signs and symptoms persist and I think that some of them will be with me for a long time. In the next months, I may want to publish one or two articles about what I have learned from the nutritionist and from the expert on alternative medicine.

In the next two posts, I will write about lessons learned and thank all the people who have helped me through these difficult times. 

2020: the year that changed my life forever. Part 5: first signs of recovery

Dear readers,

the sessions at the nutritionist and at the expert on alternative medicine were very useful and brought some important improvements. However, the main problem was that each profession, including the doctors, basically worked on their own and sometimes even disapproved of the other's methods. If they had collaborated and exchanged information properly, it would have been much better.

On 7th September I left for London to visit my mother and sister. It was a very important but strange experience: on the one hand, I really enjoyed being in London again, but on the other hand, due to some bad spontaneous decisions and choices of food, episodes and physical symptoms came back and I even had a breakdown the day before leaving. What triggered them was the decision to sleep flat on my back again, which caused acid to come up to my mouth and nose again and some other digestion problems, which in turn caused more episodes.

After my stay in London, things started to improve, thanks to three key elements: my new diet, my new daily routine and activities, but mainly vitamin D. The expert on alternative medicine had recommended it and it turned out being a life saver. It took at least two to three weeks before it had any effect, but it played a very important role in the healing process. In fact, I soon realized I had a lot of more energy. I finally managed to go back to my favourite free time activities and practice them on a regular basis: watching films and series, reading a book, listening to music.

Unfortunately, exactly when things had started to improve, a bad choice of remedy caused a serious deterioration of my physical condition. The expert who had recommended vitamin D had also suggested I should take probiotics. In her opinion, they would activate and accelerate the healing process and would really make a difference. This was not true, according to the nutritionist: she said that I should not take any extra nutrients as they could potentially make things worse. I decided to make a compromise: I took them only for a couple of days and half the recommended dosage. Unfortunately, the nutritionist was right: the probiotics normally contain an additional ingredient (in my case, it was corn starch) that produces sugar when it reaches the stomach. If ingested in its natural form in food, it would not cause any problems, but isolated and used as an additive, it destroyed my digestive system. To make things worse, the medicine I had been taking against acid finished the job. Following my doctor's and the experts' advice, I managed to stop taking it completely.

One Saturday, as I came back home from shopping I had a sudden and unexpected episode. (I had not had any episodes for several weeks, the last being the one I had before leaving London). At that moment, I thought: this is it, it's over now, more physical symptoms will be triggered and who knows if and when I'll ever recover. However, to my utter surprise, nothing happened. My body was finally fighting back, thanks to vitamin D and to all the efforts I had been making to keep my thoughts under control. I have not had any other episode since then. The monster is dead.

2020: the year that changed my life forever. Part 4: further developments

Dear readers,

after I was released from hospital, I started taking other steps to get better and I found a nutritionist who could help me establish the correct diet. On 24th June I had my first session with her and we set up a plan. With her help I managed to stabilize a little and decrease my weight loss rate. 

When things started getting worse, I called my doctor and he gave me another referral to the specialist. I called to make an appointment, hoping to soon be able to talk to him, but instead I had to wait more than a month: we fixed a first meeting for a preliminary talk for the 12th August and another one for the week after for a colonoscopy.

In the meantime, I started looking for a psychologist who would be able to make an appointment in the short term, but I could not find any. Three of them would not even accept any new patients. One of them suggested I should go to to the emergency medical service (doctors who can help you in days and times when your doctor is not available) but they also could not help. The only option was to find a private one. I found a few psychotherapists specialized in alternative medicine and I decided to give it a go. On the 4th August I went to my first session.

On the 12th August I went to my first appointment with the gastroenterologist, hoping to have the chance to explain my situation, but he just had a few minutes for me: first of all, this was supposed to be just a preliminary meeting where he would have told me all I needed to know about a colonoscopy. Secondly, he had noticed a so called tumour marker in my blood: something that could indicate the presence of a tumour. On that same day I did another blood test and an RMT of my brain and fortunately they could not find anything. In fact, the tumour marker in my blood had also disappeared. The doctor was also quite angry and upset about the whole thing: he had noticed the marker in the blood test results from the hospital but none of the doctors there had detected it. He said to me: "That's how things go: they don't do their job well and then they send all the patients to me and I don't have the time to take care of them. If they had done their job well, you would not have to sit here now and go through all this".

On the 21st August I went to have the colonoscopy and fortunately they did not find anything at all. This result confirmed the first diagnosis: a psychosomatic disorder. Well, now I can say "fortunately", but at the time it was not so: after the colonoscopy I had a complete mental breakdown. I had really been looking forward to this test because I was absolutely sure they would find something and eliminate it and I could slowly come back to my normal life. When the doctor told me there was nothing wrong with me, at first I did not think much of it and I tried to feel happy about it. The day after it dawned on me: I would never manage to get well. The doctor had not managed to eliminate the problem and I would continue to lose weight and my condition would deteriorate further. However, this moment lasted only a weekend and, thanks to my new daily routine, I managed to keep my thoughts under control. 

At first, the situation got worse, of course: as usual, after the episode, I was hit by the force of the physical symptoms. However, now I had a new weapon: looking forward to something. I realized that having something to look forward to would keep my mind busy and I could indeed control my thoughts better. That is what had happened with the colonoscopy, for example, and now I was looking forward to something else: my trip to London. 

2020: the year that changed my life forever. Part 3b: a new physical dimension

Dear readers,

They say our stomach is our second brain and indeed it's true: if the connection between your brain and your digestive organs is severed as mine was, the system just stops working. They call it a functional disorder and basically it refuses to do its job because there is no proper interaction between your mind and the stomach or colon. 

Physically, it was really terrible. Though I never had real pain, I experienced symptoms that I had never had before and I could not have a normal meal anymore: my body was not able to process and digest food properly anymore, and for this reason I started losing more and more weight. It's very difficult for me to describe my symptoms: often food felt like a knife or a stone going down through my stomach and colon, some other times it felt like mud. Very often it stopped in the middle for hours. Due to the recurrence of psychosomatic episodes, things started to get worse: after each episode, my physical condition deteriorated and it took longer to recover each time. At the beginning, it took a few days to a week, but then it became weeks, sometimes more than a month. The more intense and longer the episode was, the more intense also the physical symptoms were. It got to a point when I could not even wear any pants or trousers at home, as any minimal pressure around the belly down to my waist caused a lot of discomfort and it really felt as if it stopped food from descending through my digestive organs.

Probably, the worst was seeing myself disappear: imagine that from March until at least December 2020 I kept losing and losing weight and I never gained any. I got to a point that I started having pain because of that. I also started avoiding looking at myself in the mirror, as I would notice the clear signs of weight loss and that would trigger further episodes at times. Same was for checking my weight: last time I weighed myself was a long time ago, probably in October when I last went to the nutritionist after having come back from London. After that, I decided I would not check my weight anymore until I would notice clear and visible improvements. Although I started noticing them more than a month ago now, I still have not stepped on the scale again. I have promised myself I'll do it soon, maybe on my birthday :-).   

In my next post, I'll come back to my story and talk about further developments.

2020: the year that changed my life forever. Part 3a: a new psychological dimension

Dear readers,

on Wednesday 3rd June I was released from hospital. I believe that here was the first failure of the health system: had I immediately been directed or referred to a specialist, surely things would have gone differently. At first things started to improve: the anxiety and fear over the virus had almost completely gone away and my physical symptoms improved a bit. However, the connection between my digestive system and my mind had already been severed, so any slightly negative thought or worry would cause problems in my digestion. I continued having what I call psychosomatic episodes: moments when I lost control of my thoughts and soon after physical symptoms started. Moreover, acid played a big role in all this: I had been taking medicine to control it and increased dosage when I noticed that it helped a lot whenever I had psychosomatic episodes. However, in the long run this medicine destroyed my digestive system. It basically acted like a drug: brought relief in the first weeks following an episode, but then created some kind of dependence.

My mind has always been active 24/7: the only time when I really have no thoughts whatsoever is at night. In 45 years of my life, this has never been a problem: never felt anxious, worried or afraid, never felt panic or similar emotions. Suddenly, not even the activities that would normally keep me mentally busy and concentrated (watching a film, listening to music, reading a book, playing the piano, etc...) could prevent episodes. I had to find new ways to spend my free time and I soon realized that only by spending it with other people could I keep my mind from wandering around, thus keeping my physical symptoms under control. I honestly believe that if I lived in a big city, full of activities and chances to get to know new people, I would have managed to overcome my problems in a relatively short time. In fact, in the days when I was most active, my stomach worked better and symptoms stopped. The problem was that I basically almost do not have any friends and have just a few contacts in the city where I live. I actually called out for help, but to no avail: the only friend I have here is extremely busy and could not spend much time at all with me and the others are just slight acquaintances who mostly did not answer my call.

I soon realized that the only option was online: I established a constant contact with my family, contacted some Italian friends, developed new connections and friendships through language exchange activities. The funny thing is that I did not really want to do all this: I live alone and love to spend time on my own. I have never felt lonely in my life, not even with all this going on. I had to change my lifestyle and daily routine because what was for me completely normal before (my thoughts wandering around without problems, even when they were negative), now was causing physical symptoms. At a certain point, episodes started coming for no apparent reason, sometimes exactly in moments when I was feeling well. I remember one day I was having a walk and was enjoying the absence of any discomfort, when I suddenly started thinking: here they come again, here they come again.... and of course, they came. It was as if my body was so used to having symptoms that their absence had become an exception.

I started to occupy my time with many different activities: I bought an Xbox console to play video games and also pencils and pens for colouring and drawing (I haven't started drawing yet, but I still intend to!). I also went shopping very often and I almost developed an addiction! Fortunately, I always bought things that I needed or that I would have wanted to buy anway.  

I also started investigating the reasons and circumstances that would trigger episodes in order to prevent them and fight back. I discovered, for example, that one trigger was work: apparently, one or two slight disappointments and dissatisfactions related to my colleagues that I had had in previous years would unconsciously trigger physical symptoms. I managed to address the issue with my coworkers during a meeting and the episodes connected with work slowly decreased in intensity and then disappeared.

In the next post I'll address the physical dimension.

2020: the year that changed my life forever. Part 2: the initial phase

Dear readers,

At the conference dinner there was a very large buffet and I assume that something I ate there started the whole thing: it was probably an infection that created an imbalance between my mind and my digestive system. For two or three days after the conference I had a few quick and not very healthy meals which made things even worse and on Wednesday 11th March, after a meal at the university canteen, I started having the first symptoms: a light general discomfort and formication all over my hands. My first thought was that I had caught the Corona virus at the conference. Normally, this thought would not have not caused any particular trouble, but the first seed had been already planted and in a few days it developed into a real problem: parallel to the physical symptoms of a typical stomach flu (diarrhoea, nausea, abdominal cramps, digestion problems, etc...), for the first time in my life I developed feelings of fear, panic and anxiety in connection with the Corona virus. My daily life changed dramatically: I washed my hands several times during the day, went into panic whenever I inadvertently touched my face, used gloves all the time and was afraid of coming closer to other people. In the first weeks of the first lockdown we did not have to wear masks (they became available later on) and when I went shopping I rushed through the supermarket and in a few minutes I had picked up all I wanted to buy.

In the meantime, my doctor had contacted me to reschedule an appointment I had made a few months before for the end of April for a general check-up. They wanted to postpone it to the end of May, but due to the problems I was having at the time, I asked if I could go as soon as possible. We agreed on the 8th May. After a thorough check up, he gave me a referral to a gastroenterologist for a gastroscopy. One important factor he was concerned about was my weight loss: I don`t know exactly how much I weighed before everything started, but I would estimate around 62 or 63 kg. On 8th May I weighed 56.

My physical symptoms had changed by then and they were not those of a typical stomach flu anymore but at a certain point I had also started having problems with acid and with food ingestion: very often, whatever I ate, it felt like the food stopped in my lower chest and would not enter my stomach. I felt acid all over me and it even reached my mouth and my nose. I had to put loads of things under the mattress to elevate my upper chest and head to fight acid reflux.  

I also realized that the two groups of symptoms were connected in a way: the panic and the emotions I had due to my state of anxiety caused a deterioration of my physical condition. I soon became aware of the fact that every time I had episodes of panic and anxiety my physical symptoms got worse and I could hardly eat anything. Moreover, the formication that I sometimes had over my hands extended to my arms and legs as well. Later I also started feeling slight pain on both sides of my forehead, which I found out to be psychosomatic: my nerves were aching. I called the specialist to ask if I could bring forward the appointment, but it was not possible. When I explained my current symptoms to the nurse (the ones related to my stomach), her reaction really upset me: her tone was quite arrogant and annoyed, as if she felt I was wasting her time. She said something like: "Oh, come on, it`s ridiculous, the stomach is always open and food always goes through it, it must be something else". If you work as a health care worker, remember this: no matter what you want to say to a patient and no matter how ridiculous what they say may sound to you, your tone of voice and attitude are extremely important and can even make things worse. I remember I had symptoms on that day, just after that phone call.

Anyway, I must also say that the anxiety related to the Corona virus did not actually last that long. In fact, by the end of May it had almost completely gone away but soon re-emerged, this time connected to my current physical status: the inability to digest properly and the resulting weight loss. When my doctor asked me if I had any anxiety or if I was worried about something, I told him that the only worry I had was my own physical condition. Later I discovered that any slightly negative thought or worry would then be a trigger for physical symptoms, probably due to the disconnection between my digestive system and my mind.

On Thursday 28th May, the day before the preliminary talk with the specialist (two weeks before the scheduled gastroscopy) I went to the doctor and he gave me a referral to the hospital, where I stayed for five days and did all possible tests. Final diagnosis: everything was fine, nothing was wrong with me, my symptoms had a psychosomatic origin. I was told I could go home and go back to my normal life. I was of course relieved that they did not find anything wrong with me, and indeed things started to improve, but it did not last long. The worst had yet to come.

2020: the year that changed my life forever. Part 1: how it all began

Dear readers,

for the first time in my life I have decided to share something very private and personal that happened to me in 2020 and changed my life forever. The reason why I have taken the decision to share my experiences with you all is that this information may help people deal with similar experiences and also because I strongly believe that these issues need to be addressed and talked about more often in our society. I am going to tell my story in a series of posts, as it is quite a long one and it would be impossible to publish it all in one go. In this first instalment I`ll just give you a first general introduction and I will then publish an article every two or three days. Due to the very private nature of the subject, comments have been disabled. 

It all started one day at the end of February 2020 in my office, the moment I believe to be the point of no return in this long story. I was getting things ready for a conference I would attend the week after and I was looking forward to my holiday trips, first to London then to Italy. Corona was not much of a problem: the only problem for me was that I risked to have to be quarantined for two weeks in Italy in case someone resulted positive at the hotel where I would be staying, and that was out of the question: I had to come back home and to my work.

On that day my boss was in a meeting in the lab opposite my office and before leaving she popped in to say hello. She just told me that she was going to cancel her participation to the conference but she did not have to mention the reason why: I could see she was worried about something and I knew that it was about the Corona epidemic. I thought about it for a moment and hesitated, while she she was talking to a colleague outside my office. After a few seconds, maybe a little over a minute, she slowly started down the stairs. Had she stayed there longer, I would have possibly called her back in to ask her if she could have cancelled for me, too. I just don`t know, but I might have very well done it. Once she had left, my decision was clear: I was going to the conference. I had already asked the conference staff about a possible cancellation, but they told me that I would not get any refund from them if I cancelled, as Frankfurt Oder was not a risk area for Corona, so I thought I might as well go. In the worst case, I would arrive there and then decide if to take part, as I would receive the usual refund after the conference from my employer. On Wednesday 4th March I left for Frankfurt an der Oder.

Had I decided to cancel and stayed at home, probably nothing would have happened. I surely would have cancelled my holidays in London and Italy, as I actually did a few days after I came back from the conference. However, little did I know at the time that attending that conference would have triggered a series of life-changing events and conditions that will influence and determine my daily life for the years to come. In the next part, you will learn about the onset of my condition and the very first developments.