illness

Can You Have a Midlife Crisis At 31?

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I grew up seeing Hollywood tell us that the 30s are when we are ‘thirty, flirty and thriving’…well one thing I am certain of…I am not thriving! I’m sat here at my PC, with no real direction in life.

Lets rewind a little…So last year, I turned 30…and I started it in the hopes of having the best decade of my life! That all came crashing down on me when I found out that I needed another major surgery (you can read about it in my ‘living with a hidden…not so hidden illness’ series). This meant that I spent the majority of last year preparing for the surgery, having the surgery and then the long process of recovering from the surgery. To be completely honest, it kicked my butt! It was an incredibly hard process and mental battle to overcome the trauma, physically and mentally.

But here I am in 2023…31 years old…my small business not doing well…looking for a part time job but being either overqualified or underqualified…not sure where to go career wise. Completely having a crisis…

I see all my friends with their successful careers and knowing what direction their life is going in, feeling so proud of them and yet re-evaluating my situation and just feeling lost. The field I studied in, since COVID, has just fallen flat. Oh and the small issue of not living near the ocean to actually work feasibly in my field. So then the question is…what field do I go in to? What interests me? And that is where the crisis really started. The only answer I kept coming up with, was something creative…something like my small business…but as I mentioned before… Tap & Co is not doing well…

So then what?

  • Retail – worked in that for a year and a half and couldn’t really see a career path for me plus working weekends sucked!
  • Hospitality – Worked in that a few times now and same as in retail, weekend work…and the hours were rough!

Here is where I am struggling…Do I just take any office based job and just suck it up to make a bit of money and a career for myself. Or do I keep looking to find something I enjoy? I know I’m extremely privileged in the sense that my fiancé is able to support both of us with his job until I find something, but with the wedding looming, I want to help…I also hate not working…I mean I am daily making stock for Tap & Co and posting on socials etc for it…but with it not doing well, maybe I miss being successful…

Life hasn’t been the easiest the last 10-15 years for me. My health made it incredibly difficult to have a sense of a ‘normal’ life, so it’s only natural that I am jealous of those who didn’t have those issues and are in a great career. But I want to better myself. I want to find a career I enjoy, help pay for the wedding and start thriving.

I always thought a midlife crisis happened in your 50s…but I took a cold hard look at my life in the last couple months and I can honestly say that I am having a crisis at 31…so maybe its a 1/3rd life crisis?

Whatever your situation is…maybe you’re thinking of a completely different career, maybe like me, you don’t know where to start. That’s okay…it’s okay not to know what direction your life is going in…it’s okay to take the time to figure it out! One day we will look back at this time and laugh (hopefully), and we will be thriving no matter your age! So here’s to the rest of my 30s where I will be thriving!

Keep your head up! We have got this!

Living with a hidden (not so hidden) illness…Part 4

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   So here I am…3 months after my surgery. I wish I could say that it was all plain sailing and that I’m doing great. Unfortunately, that hasn’t been the reality at all.

Recovery at Home:

   After I got home, I genuinely thought that recovery would be a whole lot faster. And it did…to an extent…I no longer heard women vomiting at all hours of the day…I was no longer sleeping on a plastic bed…I had my own bathroom again.

   But you know what? Getting on and off the sofa is really hard if you don’t have someone to help you! Using the stairs was an absolute pain and climbing in and out of the shower (we have a shower head over a bath tub…) was again, only possible if I had some help. I was literally living the invalid life. I couldn’t do anything without help.

   My poor parents gave up their bed for me as I couldn’t climb into mine (I have a mid-sleeper (similar to this…https://amzn.to/2Hagjco). So whilst I couldn’t use my stomach muscles…that bed was impossible to get in to! But it was a goal I could set myself…I gave myself two weeks, optimistic I know…but I managed it!

Stitches:

   The part that I dreaded the most was getting my stitches removed. Well, stitch. I had one running stitch with a bead on either end. I had had multiple nightmares about waking up and having pulled my stitch out in my sleep…but luckily that never happened. Instead, 10 days later I found myself at the hospital (unfortunately not the one where I had had my surgery and appointments) waiting for my name to be called.

   My doctors surgery was extremely busy, so the options I had was to wait a further 3 days and have them removed at my doctors, or go to the local walk in centre and have them removed there. So off dad and I went to the local hospital. My nerves were all over the place…Was it going to hurt? Was the entire wound going to open again? Would it be infected?

   After an almost 2 hour wait, my name was finally called. To say that the nurse was confident…that would be really pushing it! She looked so intimidated, which as someone with anxiety…it really didn’t help! Luckily the actual removal of the stitch and beads, I didn’t feel at all.

   However. She proceeded to look at the wound and didn’t look happy. Of course, where the beads had been, the wound hadn’t fully closed. She was also convinced that it was infected and proceeded to tell me that she was going to put a plaster over the entire area and it would have to stay on for a week.

   Alarm bells went off in my head on the way home…growing up, I always learnt that an open wound needed air to close. Not be completely enclosed. But, her being in the medical profession, dad and I trusted her opinion. So guess what…7 days later when it was time to remove the plaster…the plaster had turned to jelly and it was completely infected.

   So off I went to the doctors office where it was confirmed that it had become infected and I needed to go on antibiotics for 10 days.

 

Becoming ‘Normal’ Again:

   A couple weeks after the surgery, I was finally able to get in and out of the shower on my own, I was able to climb into my bed and I was finally able to move around, without moving at a snails pace.

   Reintegrating into society was different though. If you have read my previous blog posts, then you know that I suffer from anxiety. I had gotten so into my head over the previous weeks…scared that someone would hit my stomach and that would open the stitches again. Luckily that never happened…but I had to be careful.

   Even though I was physically starting to look ‘normal’. I still had to be careful. I learnt that the hard way when I decided to make my chunky veggie chilli (chunky-veggie-chilli/). Chopping the vegetables hurt. I ended up in bed for the following 2 days in pain. The frustration was unreal!

Life After:

   So here I am…writing this 3 months after my life changing surgery. Still a far way off being in full health. But a lot closer to that than I have ever been! I’m learning now what its like to have a healthy human body. The swelling is still going down and I’m feeling better in my skin.

   The one thing that no one warned me about was how intense the changes would be and there was no mental preparation. I also didn’t have any followup appointments for how I’m coping mentally. So the last couple months have been hard. I’ve been dark, but I’m working through a day at a time.

   Now I’m just looking forward to all the things that I couldn’t do before!

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Living with a hidden (not so hidden) illness…

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So some of you are aware that I have been fighting fibroids for the best part of 6ish years (that I am aware of). It is far from easy and I feel like it isn’t as well known an illness as it should be! So here is my story and how I am living with it!

So around 6 years ago I realized that my periods were getting more and more painful and lasting longer…Not ideal at all! Eventually, I said to my parents that I need to see a doctor. And so off we went. One of the members of my dad’s church at that point kindly agreed to see me and ran so many different tests to see what was wrong. A couple days later I came back to get the results. Suspected fibroids…so I needed to go a couple doors down and get a scan done. This is where it was confirmed that I had multiple fibroids in my womb…and they were large!

Unfortunately, I couldn’t continue my treatment with them, and so I went back to the NHS where I needed to be rescanned and all the tests had to be done again…by the time that all the results had come back, I knew they had grown. I started to look pregnant…So they decided to scan again…this was almost a year after the initial scans had been done and this time they were 30x30cm and there were 2 main tumors. This explained why I looked pregnant and couldn’t lose weight. Unfortunately,  it affected my everyday life, at this point, I was in my second year of university, about to start my last year. Just walking up the stairs was difficult and I would lose breath…let alone having 12 hour practicals where I had to clamber over rocks and try and hold my balance. The issue was, was that because the fibroids were so large, they pushed everything to a different place. This meant that my intestines were pushed up, which in turn meant that my lungs were squashed.

That time of my life was incredibly hard. My last year of my undergrad was easily one of the worst years of my life. My boyfriend (Jamie) had to basically move in with me to help me for days on end as I could barely get out of bed without collapsing and I just had no energy. I had other serious health scares in that last year too, but somehow I managed to finish and got my degree! However, that was not the end of the story for my fibroids. They kept growing and growing and the pain on my spine was becoming unbearable. They were so large that they were actually pushing my spine outwards…as you can imagine, everything hurt then…even lying down!

Eventually, I got in contact with a specialist in fibroid care and he took my case seriously and was shocked to see such a young person going through this. I was only 20 when it was finally diagnosed. He suggested that I go on hormone therapy as the tumors were too large to operate on unless I wanted a hysterectomy, which I really didn’t. So for 6 months, I was taking daily hormones to try and shrink it, and it did! At the end, one of my fibroids had almost completely vanished and the other was down to 10x15cm. A HUGE improvement! However, that doctor went away on a sabbatical, and here I am a year later and still haven’t heard anything new. So my fibroids have grown again and now I’m chasing the doctors to hear what my next step is. So here I am, still waiting…

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I know my situation is a weird one, as I am a caucasian girl in her early 20s and I have fibroids that are normally only seen in African women…It is almost unheard of here in western Europe to have fibroids this large and this fast growing. What I do know is that my fibroids are caused by a hormone imbalance, I make too much estrogen…So even though surgery is imminent for recovery, unless I stay on low-grade hormone tablets for long-term periods, they will come back and it will happen fast.

One thing that has bothered me the most through all this is that when you’re going to get ultrasounds done to see where the fibroids are and how large they are, they do put you in the same area as expecting mothers. Now most of the time that is not a big issue. However, in my case, I have been told that I might never be able to have kids. That was devastating news for me and then being in a room with expecting mothers is a bit of a kick in the stomach! Another thing that has bothered me a lot is people coming up to me asking me how far along am I…I really want to have kids of my own, but I also know that that might not happen for me, so it hurts…

But through all of this you have to keep a smile on your face, otherwise, the days will become dark and you lose hope! Know someone who is going through this? Give them a huge hug and just be there for them! It’s not easy!

Have any of you experienced the same thing? Know of any treatments? Want to know anything in particular? Write a comment or message me privately!! Would love to hear from you all!!

For now… the adventure continues!