About a year ago, I began to experience a new onset of nausea and and intermittent vomitting during meals. I sought medical treatment, and I now have a diagnosis and appropriate medication. So, all is well!
But I wrote the following before the diagnosis and treatment, and I'm sharing those insights here so that they may resonate with someone in the midst of their own medical mystery. If this is where you find yourself at the moment, I am sending you so much compassion and love.
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This mind is busy doing what nearly any mind will do with a medical puzzle… try to figure it out! My mind is highly conditioned to analyze, dig, and create a list of differential diagnoses. These skills were a huge part of my professional training as a medical speech-language pathologist, and they were used daily for many years. My mind loves the challenge! As soon as I stopped actively vomiting, my busy mind got to work directing me to Google search, make connections between events, find patterns, analyze food intake, blah blah blah.
Was some of that activity potentially valuable? I don’t know. Time will tell. But it has been so interesting to be able to see all of that for exactly what it is:
🧠 My mind is doing what minds do.
And that’s not a problem. Any theories, diagnoses, potential outcomes, or any ruminating my mind does about this is entirely understandable and totally fine. My mind located a “problem” (health related ones always look particularly urgent and sticky, of course), and it launched itself into action to “help.” Isn’t that cool? Thanks, Mind!
Fortunately, I have been able to let this chatter run without paying it too much attention. I know just what it is (revved up thought), and I know that it means absolutely nothing about me, my health, or what’s actually going to happen. Swimming in this soup of nauseated uncertainty is not my favorite experience, but it doesn’t have to be. And it’s important to highlight that the busy, swirling thought about what is wrong with me isn’t happening all the time. It comes and goes on its own, like all other thought.
But I am human, and sometimes I get a little caught up in the thought storm. When that happens, my feelings of tightness, worry, and discomfort show up as a beautiful reminder. They are there to remind me that I am living in the feeling of my thinking, and I’m probably believing a whole lot of thought that can't be true. When I can see it for what it is, the belief in my thinking falls away, and I live a bit more from my own innate wisdom, intuition, and common sense.
The simple truth is always this: I have no idea what’s going to happen. Things will unfold as they do. I’m looking forward to seeing what’s next. In the mean time, I know I’m doing the very best I can with the thinking that shows up for me in any given moment. And I’m glad I haven’t puked again (yet)!