Eventually, when you are in the middle of a health crisis, you will start to forget what it was like to live when you were healthy - as if it was a completely different person who lived that life. Your entire life is all about how sick you are, and how you are going to get through a day, a week, a month, etc. You may get to the point where you just deal with it - you aren't exactly living your life, but you come to an acceptance that this will be your life forever.
I had those same feelings when I was sick. But here is the interesting thing about all of that: When you finally do get healthy again, you start to forget about how sick you were during that long-term illness. I sit here now, amazed that I wasn't able to even walk out to my mailbox or walk through Target without feeling dizzy and as if I was going to pass out. As I said above, you feel as if a different person must have lived that life, because it just doesn't feel real anymore. You get to the point where you don't even fear the condition coming back, even if it just might come back.
If you haven't figured it out by now, Gastroparesis is a strange illness. It completely takes away your zest for life, but can suddenly go away. In many cases, people don't start to slowly feel better until it resolves. It appears that it just decides to resolve itself. Think about having a leaky roof during a rainstorm. You start to panic, you start to run around the house looking for buckets and towels. You run to the spot where the roof is leaking, and it isn't leaking anymore. However, it is still raining and you didn't patch anything. How did the roof resolve the leaking on its own? That is what people who get "cured" from Gastroparesis often must think: I didn't do anything special to get rid of this illness. Why is it gone? Can it come back? And for those who have unresolved Gastroparesis for months, years, etc they are left wondering: Why can't mine just magically go away?
Nobody really knows the answer to that. A doctor can't say it will go away tomorrow or next week. By the same token, a doctor cannot say that it will never go away. They have no idea what it is going to do or how it is going to manifest. In the case of Colleen, the disease did seem to resolve - for months. But she woke up one morning feeling ill again. It hasn't gone away since, and the frustration because of that is overwhelming.
As a loved one, you have the responsibility of making sure to drive home the point that the disease has resolved for some people. That many of those people went through the same living nightmare as you are. They may not believe that - but you have no choice but to believe that. Simply put, even if you are a pessimistic person by nature, you need to dig deep and find your inner optimist. Otherwise, you are both heading in a direction of despair. And once you are in that hole, it will never be easy to climb out of it.
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