Sorry to hear that you've had another setback. I hope that you'll be back in circulation soon.
You've brought up one of the cruelest side effects of this disease. It seems to be virtually unrecognized in medical circles, but those of us who have been dealing with MC for a while are all too familiar with it — namely the devastating effect that the disease has on our social life and our freedom in general. And the cruel part is that the disease doesn't so much accomplish this by actually preventing us from having a social life — it does it by coercion, by making us afraid to try to have a social life. We're forced to make an extremely difficult decision. Do we isolate ourselves so that we can do the best possible job of treating the disease, or do we take chances with our treatment, in order to salvage some vestige of our former social life?
It appears to me that early on, it may be prudent to choose the former, otherwise we may never be able to achieve remission, and if we are unable to achieve remission, our social life will remain in serious jeopardy, anyway. And as we learn more about the disease, and how to do a better job of controlling the symptoms, and most importantly, as we heal, we become better able to deal with the outside world, and we become better equipped to make more informed decisions about what and where we can safely eat. And conversely, we eventually learn to recognize situations that are probably too risky to justify taking a chance on. And as you have pointed out, in those situations we can make other arrangements for eating, in order to control the risk.
But regardless of how we handle it, our social life takes a big hit, and there is no way that we can ignore the obvious, namely that certain changes are absolutely mandatory in order to reconcile the disease with our social life. A little ingenuity and prior planning often go a long way toward minimizing the risk, and making life much more enjoyable. And in the long run, no one is more innovative and better qualified to develop creative solutions than someone who has MC, because the oppressive nature of the disease forces us to become self-reliant and even more determined to not let it define who we are. We are motivated, and motivated people get results.
Not that any of this has anything to do with your current setback, but for some reason or other, your comment, "I don't want to stop having a social life altogether...", brought these random thoughts to mind.
Love,
Tex
