Day 635: Working through the pain

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For some reason my IBS is really bad today. When I woke up, I was feeling so awful that I just wanted to do the bare minimum of work and crawl back into bed. I tried to take medicine and then just wait until I felt better, but I never seemed to feel better.

I ended up trying to work through it. As usual, the discomfort and pain was very distracting and kept pulling my attention from the writing, but I would just take a break, take more medication, and wait a little while until I felt a little better.

Sometimes I was tempted to throw in the towel and finish quickly, but I tried to just be patient. Sometimes I waited almost half an hour, but I eventually felt a bit less uncomfortable and could go back to work, even if only for 15 or 20 minutes.

Because I did a lot of stopping to rest, I took longer to get my writing done today, and I didn’t get as much work done while blocking. But I’m really proud of myself that I decided to try to get some work done. I felt terrible when I woke up, but taking medicine and waiting a couple hours helped me feel well enough to write.

I don’t know if I could do this all time, pushing past the pain in order to work. But I’m starting to learn that the way to handle my chronic illness is to just be patient and wait it out, because the pain tends to come in waves. And I know that as I get better with my diet, the IBS will get better too. After all, this is the first bad day I’ve had in a couple weeks.

Come to think of it, now I’m really glad I pushed myself to do more work yesterday, despite feeling unmotivated, since my IBS is preventing me from doing as much work today.

Regency series:

Editing: Time spent: 5 minutes

Writing: Time spent: 1 hour, 15 minutes

Writing: Total number of words: 565 words

Writing streak: 114 days

Blocking: time spent: 1 hour, 18 minutes

Blocking streak: 108 days

Hawaii series:

Outlining: time spent: 22 minutes

My takeaway for today: On some days, if I’m patient and wait it out, I’ll feel well enough to be able to work through the discomfort and still get work done.

My second takeaway for today: On days I feel unmotivated and lazy, I should try to remember that I need to get work done while I’m feeling well in order to make up for the days I don’t feel so well, like today.

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