Like the poor little frog in the pot of cold water that is eventually boiled because he didn’t notice the water slowly getting hotter, until 2013, I kept dealing with symptom after symptom and not realizing that I was essentially getting closer and closer to boiling to death. I knew I didn’t feel good, but blamed it on one thing after another that was going on in my life. Not knowing the source of my health problems I also didn’t know they were all stemming from the same cause and that they were beginning to snowball. The issues I had began to aggravate one another and get worse. I started feeling worse at a faster rate than before. And soon it was happening so fast that it woke me up and convinced me that I had to have an answer.

My diabetes increasingly worsened and got harder and harder to control. I had to take more medication. This was tough on my already stressed body. My liver started swelling and being sore. I started bloating in my upper abdomen after any activity to a point that I was almost totally incapacitated.

Adding to the complexity, I had been having out of control vaginal bleeding for a couple of years and during the last weekend of January 2013, that was so bad that I was bedridden for a week. This scared me into action. My primary care physician sent me to a gynecologist who did a biopsy and found pre-cancer cells. After all my difficulty I opted for a hysterectomy. I started to wonder if perhaps that would be the answer to my problems. Maybe an angry uterus was making me feel so bad all over. After the surgery it was hard to know what pain was post surgical and what pain was health problem x. As I neared my sixth week post surgery, I concluded that this was not the source of my agony.

My primary care physician next suspected my gall bladder. None of the tests indicated a problem, in fact, my gall bladder performed far above and beyond the standard. Still wondering if it was a problem of this nature, my primary care physician sent me to a gastroenterologist.