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.
