Where I’ve Been and Future Projects

Hi. It’s been a while since I’ve published regularly. Eight years, to be exact! Time really does fly. This place may have been quiet most of that time, but my life has been anything but. So what happened? Where have I been? Is A Clean Plate a relic of the past? Well, it all starts with…

Burnout

In 2018, I felt like I’d reached a happy stasis with my own autoimmune diseases and was beginning to sense that, after six years of full-time blogging, it was time to leave the AIP behind. I was burnt out on all things food. Keeping up with social media algorithms was frustrating, taking photos felt more like a chore than a passion, and I was running out of recipe ideas I was excited about testing. Blogging had been a survival skill when I was in the thick of my autoimmune diagnoses, but now that I’d healed to the point of being able to regularly leave the house for the first time as an adult, I felt like I needed a break. In fact, I was incredibly depressed. I thought it would help to find something to do that didn’t involve thinking about chronic illness all the time. And how lucky I was to be well enough to entertain that thought!

On top of that, my partner, increasingly disabled by his chronic back pain and multitude of herniated discs, had to leave his physically demanding career. It seemed like everything was pointing to me needing to get a job with more stable income. We wound up leaving Austin and buying a cheap house in a very, very small town where we could make ends meet on the bare minimum until we found something suitable for both of us. But two years later, my partner’s health had declined even further, we were both working odd jobs we didn’t really like, and there weren’t a lot of other prospects locally. My mom suggested we move back to our hometown to help out with her pet-sitting business, which was doing really well. And after ten years away, as much as I didn’t like my hometown, being closer to my family sounded nice.

Caretaking Back Home

So in 2020, we moved again, bought a moldy condo, fixed it up, and became pet sitters. It was the perfect job for our health issues, both physical and mental. Cute puppies and kitties, a little bit of exercise and time outdoors, and short bursts of work multiple times throughout the day instead of one long 8+ hour slog. And even though business took a hit from Covid, it was a great industry to be in, because we only ever interacted with pets and hardly ever had to be around people. I’d also finally started anti-depressants and was feeling a lot more functional. Plus, my mom had just been diagnosed with lung cancer, and our location was convenient to my aging grandma, who increasingly needed help with everyday tasks at a time my mom wasn’t available as much. The pandemic threw a wrench into grandma’s plans to move into assisted living, so after a couple of years driving back and forth every day (and dealing with our horrific neighbors), we decided to just sell the condo and move in with her.

By then, my husband’s health issues had progressed to the point where he could no longer pet sit reliably, either. Since 2018, he’d been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder, panic attacks, depression, sleep apnea, narcolepsy, PTSD, and fatty liver disease on top of his back problems, allergies, autism, and severe ADHD. None of the treatments were helping any of his issues and none of the doctors we were able to see knew what else to do with him. Of course, it’s a familiar story to me, but it’s so much harder to watch someone you love go through it than it is to do it yourself, and none of my expertise from treating my own conditions was very helpful for any of his. We agreed he’d stay home with grandma while I went to work. This was our norm until grandma’s dementia became too severe for us to manage safely. After a lot of consideration, she moved into assisted living in late 2023, just in time for…

Three New Diagnoses

I’d started having pain in my left ovary in early 2023. I knew it was a cyst (I’ve had PCOS since my teens) and I kept telling myself it would go away on its own, even though I knew I should get it checked out just to make sure it wasn’t cancer. But between work and trying to take care of my family and home, I didn’t find the time and energy until after grandma moved out eight months later. Once I got the ball rolling with my doctors, it took two more months to find out it wasn’t cancer (phew!) and another month after that to get surgery to remove it, because the pain had become crippling and it was clear it wasn’t going away on its own.

My surgery was at the end of December, 2023. It was a straightforward laparoscopic cystectomy and I went home the same day. But I came home with a new diagnosis of severe endometriosis. This is jumping ahead a bit, but the cystectomy didn’t help at all. My ovary kept hurting, my abdominal pain redoubled, and less than a year later, thanks to a uterine prolapse and a diagnosis of pelvic congestion syndrome on top of the endometriosis, I have a total hysterectomy scheduled.

But going back to that first surgery, I started having a lot of stomach problems, including severe upper abdominal bloating as well as intense nausea every time I ate or drank anything. I was diagnosed with chronic gastritis and the PPI inhibitor I was prescribed didn’t help. The only things I could reliably stomach were sugary, carbonated drinks like Sprite and gluten-free crackers or pretzels. Not ideal when you have multiple other health problems that require a specific diet that does not include soda or pretzels. I was absolutely miserable for three months, barely eating or drinking, just waiting for the gastritis to subside. Fortunately, it eventually did.

Butt Then…

During the laparoscopy, the surgeon noted one more thing. My colon was stuffed! No surprise; I’ve struggled with constipation my entire life and not even the AIP could fix that. Every doctor that’s ever seen inside my abdomen has told me I’m full of shit. But a month after my surgery, I was doing colonoscopy prep for the first time since my Celiac test in 2010. It was even more unpleasant than I remembered and I was glad when the whole thing was over.

But my colon, not to be outdone, was full of sessile serrated polyps, a type of precancerous polyp that is very difficult to see and grows quickly. I was diagnosed with SPS, serrated polyposis syndrome, which means I’m going to keep having these polyps develop and nobody really knows why. I was told I’d have to get annual colonoscopies for the rest of my life. SPS comes with an estimated 1 in 4 risk of developing colon cancer at some point and if you already don’t drink or smoke, there’s not much you can do to decrease that risk. I had a second colonoscopy a month later to try to remove the two polyps, but he was only able to find one of them again, so I had a third colonoscopy in June to remove the second one… but instead of removing it, he found two more!

Fortunately, the new ones were benign, but at this point I’d had three colonoscopies in six months and still had a precancerous polyp that was over an inch long. I’d already started to wonder if we should just remove my colon so I could stop having the shadow of cancer hanging over me, so it was a huge relief when my doctor suggested it might be time to consider a colectomy. A partial one would significantly reduce my cancer risk, but I’d still have to have annual check-ups. The surgery went well and the recovery was much easier than the cystectomy, surprisingly enough. It did probably, unfortunately, cause my uterus to prolapse, though. Hopefully the upcoming hysterectomy will be the end of all this!

I confronted my mortality when I was waiting to find out if my ovarian cyst was cancerous and I was so, so lucky that it wasn’t. Learning I had a chronic colon cancer problem just a few months later was the worst kind of whiplash. I was torn between making the most of whatever time I had left by doing everything I ever wanted to accomplish as quickly as possible… and just taking it easy and trying to enjoy each passing moment for what it is, like a Miyazaki character staring at a flower. When you realize how lucky you are to be alive, everything feels both more meaningful and entirely meaningless and I often wound up sitting, doing nothing, overwhelmed by the choices available to me and the pressure to do something. I have so many unfinished projects, but who will care if I don’t finish them? So many things I’ve put off because I have to work, but if I love my job, is that so bad? And so many fears about what would happen to my partner if I pass before he does. It’s not a fun headspace. With all our issues, it feels like we’re constantly in a holding pattern, waiting for some test results, or a treatment to start, or a follow-up. So much for those brief, shining moments of not thinking about chronic illness… but I have hope we can get there again, someday.

The Future

So, where does that leave us? It’s the end of 2024. I still have hopes and dreams for A Clean Plate. I still have cookbooks I never finished, second editions of my meal plans I never took photos for, and actual hundreds of recipes saved as drafts on the blog, waiting to be formatted for publication. I’d love to get some or all of that out into the world. I’ve toyed with them a few times over the years, but always wind up burned out again, too busy with my job, family, friends, home, and my own health to dedicate the time and energy needed to finish a project. Occasionally, I’ll throw a recipe onto the site that was pretty much ready to go anyway.

After everything I’ve been through since my first surgery, and with my 7-days-a-week sitting business, I don’t see that changing any time soon. I’m just so busy and when I’m not busy, I’m tired. My health has to become my priority again, as does my husband’s, or there’s no point to anything else. After all, I can’t test recipes if my gastritis is too severe to actually eat those recipes. And I can’t finish a cookbook, or a novel, or travel to see far-flung friends and family if I’m in too much pain to work or too poor from being out of work to afford groceries or my medical bills or whatever else I need. Unavoidably, life gets smaller when you’re chronically ill. It doesn’t have to; that’s just the way our culture has decided to do things. If you’re here, you probably already know that. You’ve probably been through similar things, or harder things, or know someone who has.

All that to say, I don’t know what the future holds. I hope I find some semblance of health again and I hope my husband does, too. I hope we have many, many, many happy years in our future, regardless of how we spend them. I hope I get to create something I’m proud of again, whether that’s here or somewhere else. And I hope that even if I don’t, the recipes and meal plans I’ve already put out continue to help people feel better, find hope, and appreciate that they’re not alone in all this. Most of all, I want to thank you for joining me, however long you’ve been here. I hope you also have many, many, many happy moments until we meet again—whenever and wherever that may be!