Drag me to well

From Drag Me To Hell IMDb.com page

All she has to do is get rid of that button. (If you haven’t seen Sam Raimi’s movie Drag Me To Hell, I won’t give away the ending, but spoiler alert about some plot points.) In Drag Me To Hell, a young woman working at a bank is trying to prove to her boss that she can be as ruthless as her colleagues, to earn a much-needed promotion. This results in her being unkind to a tiny old woman who begs her for a little more time to catch up on her mortgage payments. Long story short, the old lady has special powers and while attacking her late one night, pulls a button off of her coat and curses it. Through a series of events, the protagonist discovers the only way to rid herself of the curse is to pass it along to someone else — by giving them this particular cursed button the woman pulled off her coat.

As happens with IBD, I’ve been flaring to some degree for most of the past six months. At first, it was probably exhaustion and adventurous food choices from my awesome trip overseas. Then, I got C. diff somehow over the holidays. Then … well, now is then, and I don’t really know. Was it the anti-C. diff antibiotics? The new probiotics? The Kit Kat bar I took a tiny niblet of last week? The exhaustion from unsuccessfully attempting to ascend a ninja-course warped wall about 25 times? The pollen now coating every surface everywhere always? Just my genetics? Bad luck? That time in second grade I wrote that mean note to my classmate and was too scared to admit to it when I got caught? Something else?

Was it the antibiotics? The probiotics? The Kit Kat bar I took a tiny niblet of? Just my genetics? That time in second grade I wrote that mean note to my classmate and was too scared to admit it ?

I feel like there’s a cursed button somewhere that some horrible person gave me, but I can’t find it, despite years and $$$$ of searching. Or maybe there was a curse, but it’s gone but already did its damage and now I’m just living in the ruins. Or lots of tiny buttons, and I’ve found a few but have one (or 30) more left to find. It’d be pretty great to just know whether I should be looking for anything at all, let alone actually know where to look and what to do when I find it. But if I can’t even find it, it’s hard to be able to give it away (not that I would do this — I guess maybe to a murderer on death row, or a mean-spirited chicken about to be slaughtered anyway).

From Drag Me To Hell IMDb.com page

It’s not to say it hasn’t been hugely helpful, this button quest I’ve been on for a few years now. I’m significantly healthier, and I’m pretty sure it has a lot to do with diet and sleep and being done with grad school. But healthier, not healthy.

Which, again, could be fine if I knew there was no other better, healthiest-possible self out there waiting for me to pass the baton to her for the remainder of the race. And I’m not aiming for a marathon or even a 5k, or to come off my IBD medications and stop going to the doctor like 4 times a week. I really would just like to not have everything suddenly sometimes inexplicably unravel into demonic diarrhea and constipation and aches and exhaustion and cramps and infections and rashes and all the things you probably have or have had too. If I’m spending all this time and money, I’d like a little better ROI (return on investment), or even just CSSOISBM (confirmation some sort of investment should be made).

Really, I’m just aiming to shrink the button, as it was the size of a dinner plate and now it’s down to something you might see on a clown costume.

Instead, I find a loose thread and I start following it upward to the source, tugging and sometimes regretting having started the whole thing because now there’s a big hole left that I’ll have to patch. Or I think I found the button and even maybe handed it off to someone somehow for a few weeks or months, but then look down and see it sewn to my shirt again. Really, I’m just aiming to shrink the button, as it was the size of a dinner plate and now it’s down to something you might see on a clown costume.

But I am grateful for how far I’ve come with the help of many people, and a horror-movie analogy like this does help give me perspective. Unlike the cursed loan officer in Drag Me To Hell, I’m by far not alone in this dilemma, things have gotten generally better instead of increasingly worse, and the only unreasonable sacrifice I’ve been asked to make lately is dessert.