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
