The Importance of Maintaining Your Comprehensive Management Plan

I can not stress enough how important it is to maintain a Comprehensive Management Plan that works for you.  I had been feeling really good and had gotten busy with different things and let myself get distracted from my Plan which resulted in a severe flare up with violent vomiting that caused me to miss a couple days from work.  Gastroparesis reared its ugly head and brought me back to reality real quick.  Life gets busy and maintaining a good Plan takes work and is very time consuming.  It's easy to get distracted or off track, especially when your feeling good, but it is just as important to get yourself back on track and stick with the Plan that you know works.

My back has been bothering me and has made it really hard to do my morning workout routines.  I've even had a hard time doing the Yoga and that has been killing me because I just don't feel good if I don't get my Yoga routine in.  Then I made a trip out of town for a dear friends wedding.  As I've expressed in other posts, I am horrible at directions.  I get lost sooo easy.  I stress out and get severe anxiety and tense up all over.  After that trip my entire body was tensed up for a week, no exaggeration!  Wouldn't have missed being a part of my friends wedding for anything but I should have found someone to go with me to do the driving.  I had some other issues going on that was causing me a lot of stress and all of these added stressors just exacerbated my symptoms.  I had also not had a massage in about a month.  I didn't really realize how much getting a massage had become a part of my Plan until I was no longer getting them.

So now I am getting a massage about once a week and my back is feeling better.  This is allowing me to start getting my workouts in again.  I am also getting back into my daily routine that I know makes me feel better. 

It's important to remember that the Plan works but it is not a cure.  I still have Gastroparesis and that has not changed.  Maintaining my Plan allows me to live 90% symptom free but if I do not manage my Plan that results in being more symptomatic instead of being symptom free.  This is a lifestyle change not a short term objective. For me it seems that if I let one part of the Plan slide it doesn't take long for the rest to follow.  Before I know it I am very sick with nausea and vomiting and it doesn't go away very fast.  Maintaining your Plan is hard work and time consuming but the benefits are sooo worth the time and effort.  I have Gastroparesis but Gastroparesis does not have me!