Month 2 - Week 2 - Day 5: TRAPS Episode

I woke up this morning with my right eyelid so swollen I could feel it pressing on my eyeball, add in fatigue, joint pain, and it adds up to a TRAPS Syndrom episode. I drove to the retail job so that they could see that I was actually sick (In the past, I've found that jobs and teachers don't always believe I'm really sick this often). Manager sent me home where I spend the day in bed.

Before I drove off, I took a dose of my steroids to stop the episode from getting worse. I took a second dose around 6pm. I did a fair good job of sticking to the diet... Until 10pm. All day I felt hungry, but as the evening progressed the hunger got worse. By 10 pm I realized it was hunger from the medicine. The hunger pain was getting so bad I felt shaky, and like crying.

I paused to evaluate if I felt hungry because I was upset about having a flare-up. I wasn't.
Was I upset about work? No.
Bored? No.
Thirsty? No.

After running though all possible emotional reasons, I knew that I wasn't suffering from emotional hunger. I was starving. As in, the steroids burn through Medifast food so quickly it felt like my body was firmly in starvation mode.

I thought about eating a second lean and green meal. But the thought of eating meat made me feel ill. I thought about a salad, but it also didn't settle right. (It's a weird moment when you realize you are basically having a conversation with your brain and stomach trying to figure out what your body needs.) Thinking about a salad didn't sound appetizing, and the more I thought about it, the more it felt like my body was telling me that wasn't going to take away the starving feeling. It was like something in me knew that it would just burn through the salad, and I'd be back to feeling sick.

I even talked with my mom about my hunger pains. At the point when I told her I just wanted to sit down and cry because I felt so hungry, she told me that I needed to take care of myself first. She reminded me that this is a side-effect of the meds, and that if I needed something more to eat then I needed to eat.

I ate a small tortilla and a small bowl of pasta. Soon after, I felt much better. It was like my body needed the slow-burning carbs (more like the medicine made my body need carbs.)

I really tried to stick to my diet. I went the whole day and never once thought about breaking it. Even when I first realized I was extra hungry because of the meds, I didn't think I would break my diet. It wasn't until I was nauseous and wanting to cry that I knew I needed to break it, or I wasn't going to be physically okay.
I will be on the meds for another two days at least. I'm going to do my best to stick closely to the diet, but I'm working late shifts at the retail job, and need to not collapse from hunger. I may fix up a bowl of yogurt and quinoa to take to work. It's not on plan, but it's clean and healthy. More importatly, it should burn off slowly.

I didn't get anything done as I spent the day resting and reading books between resting. But I need to stay up very late tonight so that I sleep late tomorrow (since I work late). I plan on doing my 15 page manuscript review and reading a chapter in my non-fiction book.