All my adult life, I lived with hereditary chronic pancreatitis, an autoimmune, debilitating, incurable illness.

On April 9, a flustered doctor broke the news about my spontaneous remission/healing. I am now cured. They don’t know why. Well. Doesn’t matter, because I no longer have it.

We’re not sick because we’re bad people or we’ve done something wrong. We’re not ill because we’re not doing something right.

I’ve always felt queasy about the mind-body movement and stayed away from “that kind of literature.” Take a book. Regardless of the author’s intention, people use what’s written there to blame patients for their illnesses.

For doing/not doing or being/not being something that brought the illnesses onto ourselves. For not eating the right food, not doing the right exercise, not having the right mindset, or not manifesting right. Gross.

People give patients all sorts of advice. Have you tried this? Maybe there’s an oversight in your internet search. How about coconut oil?

Most of us have tried everything under the sun and the moon and back that we can think of and afford.

The morning I found out about my spontaneous healing, as I left my doctor’s office, I felt numb. Then I started feeling curious. Soon a loud and relentless HOW? was playing on repeat.

So I gave in, and for the first time, got three books on spontaneous remission by researchers who spent years studying thousands of cases. They were all looking for patterns.

Which led this Harvard doctor to come up with four pillars of healing:

One: Heal your immune system
(Me thinking, hmm, heard about it somewhere)

Two: Heal your nutrition
(Yeah that too)

Three: Heal your stress response
(Of course)

Four: Heal your identity

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。。。。。。

(I better start being obsessed) 。。。。。

Identity is all I talk about. Here, on my blog, or anywhere else.

That said, I still believe it was sheer luck that I was cured. As Marsha Linehan says, two seemingly opposing ideas can be true at the same time.

My friend M “Now that you’re cured, you can start eating real food?”

My friend N “Does that mean you can eat anything you want?”

I remember laughing in delight. They care about me. And they care about me enjoying good food. That made me so happy.

Me “No…suppose I lost my right hand in an accident, I’d have to go through treatments and surgeries and physical therapy and I have no idea what else for a long, long time. Then one day my doctors might say, ‘Hey Ayuko, you’re done for now. You’re good to go.’ But that doesn’t mean my right hand would start growing back. Same with what was lost in my internal organs. Though you can’t see it from the outside.”

M “Oh.”

N “Oh.”

I was wrong.

Fast forward several weeks and my metaphorical right hand started growing back. The little bump feels tender, the skin thinner. My body is changing. I am terrified. Tremendously grateful and overjoyed and petrified.

I have no idea what my right hand would look like or where it’ll stop growing. My plan is to be gentle and have total fun with it.

This post is dedicated to my readers who are patients.

本日のスペシャル

antiquing on the beach

perfectly smooth

loved this drawing

1日1新：コクヨ「キャンパス スタディ プランナー（デイリー）」
1日1冊：Gabor Maté「The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture」友人が表紙の写真を送ってくれたのでさっそく。読み始めたばかりです。Gabor Maté、YouTubeビデオは見てるけど本を読むのは初めて（こういう本はなるべく避けていましたからね、ふふふ）