Trusting your instinct

It’s important to trust your own instinct. That gut feeling you get about someone or something.

Recently I’ve been doing that. Particularly with my health. Any worries that I’ve been having, no matter what it is or how minor it is, I’ve been making sure I get it checked out. It’s so far been all minor things with nothing to worry about which is good.

But I’m still glad I got checked out when I did.

I learnt the hard way though. Years ago, 2 years or so before I got seriously unwell, I began having slight pains and aches in my stomach. I tried going about my life normally but deep down I knew something wasn’t right. I did kind of mention it to my consultant and parents at the time but I felt bad about wasting their time so didn’t mention it in the right way and certainly didn’t go into detail. I basically made the pain sound like a dull ache that was basically nothing. I didn’t really trust my instinct to be fair. And I told them I could cope. So nothing was done.

But deep down, something wasn’t right and a few years later we found out why. Looking back now, I can see that the pain I was getting was most likely due to the fact my stomach was growing unusually large and my organs were slowly moving with it.

Now I’m not saying that if I said something a lot sooner and trusted my gut instinct, my condition would have been sorted quicker. But something could have been done sooner, even just tests maybe.

I wish now that I listened to what my body was telling me. But I’ve learnt from my mistake.