The Silent Flare-Up (Part One)

Why Do Men Hide From Their Own Sickness?

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Content note. This one is personal. I’m talking about personal things, health things, medical stuff. If you are squeamish at all about talking about medical stuff and health stuff, then please just skip the article. You can read the TLDR and move on.

TLDR. I’m recovering from a diverticulitis flare-up that has run most of July. I misread the signals, went out too soon twice, mistook a migrating infection for a pulled muscle, and spent about two weeks in a delirium I only recognized looking back. Men are conditioned not to talk about their health, and often not even to want to know about it. This is the first of several posts on that.

Today’s posting is a little bit different from some of the usual fare here on my blog, Find Your Nova. Typically I write about astrology or philosophy or current events, or my reflection on those topics synthesized into something I’ve been thinking about, and sometimes about questions I’ve recieved from my clients or students, because the questions are relevant for a much bigger audience. Today it is something personal: my own health, and some of my recent health journeys.

I want to name right off the bat that these are two topics that are difficult for people who were born male, who were raised and encultured male, or who have been in Western societies, at least, as men. I’m going to use the word men to talk about the different kinds of men, not trying to isolate any specific gender or sexual identity, and maybe even for women some of these topics can be difficult to talk about. But it is common for men not to want to talk about deeply personal things, and not to want to talk about thier health in specific. Oftentimes they don’t even want to know about their own health, and they kind of try to hide from it. I’ve seen this tendency in myself as well as other men that are close to me.

There’s a lot that’s been coming up for me, so this may be the first of several posts about the topic of health, and it is my own health because that is where I have the deepest access to my own life journey.

I am in what I hope is some of the final stages of recovery from a recent diverticulitis flare-up. Depending upon how you measure it, this could be the second I’ve had this summer, or it could be that I’ve been in one long, continuous flare-up since this spring. The entry point is this last half of July, 2026, and then kind of working backwards from there.

What diverticulitis is

To set the stage, two years ago I was admitted to the emergency room with some of the most intense pain in my body that I had ever experienced, and the testing and diagnosis found diverticulitis. From then until now there have been reoccurring issues, but nothing that got too extreme.

For those of you who don’t know what diverticulitis is, it is when a person with diverticular disease has a flare-up. A lot of people have diverticular disease. It’s pretty common, especially in Western Caucasian people, but anybody that eats what has come to be seen as a more Western diet, or especially a more American diet, tends to have these kind of pockets that form in the intestines and the colon. These pockets can get filled with the stuff that’s inside your intestines, and when the conditions are right, they get inflamed and infected. This inflammation and this infection is extremely painful. It’s also dangerous, because it can cause the wall of the intestine or the colon to rupture and spill the contents of the intestines into your body, which can cause infection to fill your whole body, and people can die pretty quickly if it gets out of control.

It’s serious enough that if you have it and you’ve been diagnosed, and you go to the emergency room and indicate that you’re having a flare-up, you’ll probably get admitted quickly, high up there on the admissions scale. Their might be other people that still have more urgent needs, but it is one of these kinds of urgent conditions that they need to evaluate whether your colon has ruptured, kind of like your appendix rupturing.

June, and then the middle of July

This last June I was admitted to the emergency room for another flare-up. I went in early enough that I thought I caught it, got the antibiotics, and things calmed down very quickly, so the international travel I had went ahead. I managed my diet the way you’re supposed to with diverticulitis, which is not eating anything and drinking only clear liquids, so that your intestines don’t have any work to do and can start to heal. Even though I was traveling, I was basically not eating, fasting for about a week before I started eating things again. You go very slowly: very low-fiber foods to start out with, and then as you start gaining intestinal motility and normal intestine functioning, you start eating more diverse foods and more fiber, introducing foods that are harder and harder to digest, until you are back up to a normal diet. It takes a couple weeks to get back on track. I did that in June, continued traveling and did things normally, and thought things were going along well.

Then in the middle of July I had another flare up. I was starting to have more symptoms, July 13th, July 14th. I was visiting my parents in Idaho, and I didn’t want to deal with the issues around trying to receive health care out of state, so I got back in my car and drove straight from Idaho back to California. It was a very intense drive. Probably should not have done that, looking back on it. But I did.

I got back and went to urgent care, got antibiotics, the whole nine yards. Maybe I should have acted sooner.

I was operating in this mode that I think a lot of people fall into, but I think, especially a lot of men fall into, that as soon as you start to feel okay you need to get back to doing things. There’s alot of emphasis on productivity and getting stuff done, and in this society we’re kind of addicted to it; people with male bodies tend to get a lot of pressure in certain ways to perform. Even though I didn’t have specific obligations, and no corporate job to get back to, still in my mind I’m subject to the stresses: stressed that I need to be doing things, or that as soon as I’m feeling better I should be able to do stuff.

I got the antibiotics, and a day or two later started feeling better, so I rested all day and went out in the evening to visit a freind of mine, go to a birthday party, and then a performance. Didn’t drive. I Ubered, and I was trying to be careful with myself. It was too much, I was in a lot of pain.

I felt like I was okay because the pain in my belly had subsided, and what had taken its place was back pain, very intense. If you’ve ever had a tight or a pulled psoas muscle, this is what was going on for me, this kind of tight psoas causing a lot of lower back pain. What I didn’t understand at the time is that was actually an indication that the infection had moved from the colon and had started migrating backwards, more towards where my kidneys are, and it was causing my psoas to spasm and cause this intense back pain. What I had interpreted as my diverticulitis getting better, and having back pain because I’d been laying down and resting for so long, or maybe because I had driven in the car, was actually a pain that was specifically related to the infection.

I had been experiencing severe rigors, and I wasn’t running a fever, because my body was not able to produce enough energy to create one. I was cold, shaking violently, and could hardly move. I was able to get myself to a hot tub and tried to submerge myself in it to warm up, and I couldn’t get warm. The temperature was about 104 degrees Fahrenheit, but I still couldn’t get my body warmed, even sitting in there for like 20 minutes. I went and took a hot shower, and I could get the water hotter in the shower, and that did help me out a little bit. I was unable to produce body heat, and trembling. I didn’t know it at the time, but I should have gone to the emergency room at that point, and probably even called the paramedics, because I was not in any place to move or to function.

But that subsides. I stayed on the antibiotics to ride it out, and fortunately did start recovering. My son was away for the summer, and alone at home it gets lonely, so as soon as I felt better I went out with a friend to a concert, rested all day and went out for the evening, and again it was way too much. It set me back again.

These have been hard lessons to learn. I think a lot of men are conditioned to be this way. We don’t feel the permission to allow our bodies to rest, to heal, to recuperate, and to find a state of equilibrium and balance. There is this constant push to produce, perform, improve, to do, to do, to do, to get things done, to complete things. Don’t let things be in process. There’s no time to be down, can’t have time to be sick; we have to be up and present for people and be available and doing things. Maybe this is specific to me, but I see it in other men, and I think it is common, but again, just me, from my experience.

The delirium

As I’m recovering, on antibiotics and trying to stay hydrated, I found myself resting and sleeping during the day and into the nights, 10, 20 hours a day. Looking back on it, I was in a state of delirium, moving in between different states of conciousness, of wake and sleep, and having hallucinations. Visual and auditory hallucinations. Fortunately not with my eyes open, but if I would close my eyes to go to sleep I would start seeing vivid images, to the point that it was very difficult to distinguish if I was awake or asleep. It was this deep in-between state where the visual images were so real that it was only when I opened my eyes and came back to consciousness with kind of a start that I realized I had been in a deeper dream state. Some of them were quite terrifying, and these audio hallucinations were terrifying. It took a lot of my meditative training to bring myself back into a center, recognizing that these were all mental phenomena. It didn’t matter whether they were “real” or not, because they were indistinguishable from what I was perceiving as reality.

It was a very long period of delirium. We’re at July 30th today, and looking back, the fragments run from the middle of July until maybe three days ago. My antibiotics just finished a few days ago, so I don’t know whether the delirium was the sickness, or a side effect of the antibiotics, or a sign that I’m recovering enough that the delirium states are subsiding.

These kinds of internal sicknesses

What I have come to understand is that having these kinds of internal sicknesses is not the same kind of thing as having a broken arm or getting the flu. The arm breaks. You put a cast on it, it heals, you go through physical therapy, you can use it again, and you have a process of knowing that its working and functioning. You get the flu, you go through the flu cycle, you feel sick and then you feel better, and the virus is done doing its thing. But these kinds of internal sicknesses, where your systems are out of whack and there’s infection inside that you can’t quite see, there’s stuff going on that you can’t quite understand or perceive, they don’t have the same signals. It takes a lot of work to still the restless mind down to being able to feel what’s going on in the body.

I had a doctor’s appointment the other day that was, unfortunately, an hour away: an hour on the freeway to get there, be there, and drive back. It was a four-hour experience. The whole afternoon was filled with going to the doctor and coming back. I felt good going into it, but when I got back I was starting to experience stomache cramps again. So even now, where I’m starting to feel well, if I pay attention to my body there are the signs and indications that it’s still not quite done. Healing.

Today is the first day, 17 days after the first symptoms of this last flare-up, that I had what I would consider a normal bowel movement, not painful. Even since then I’ve had other issues that show things are still not fully healed.

The delirium ended a few days ago, so my mind is now starting to become better, and the cognitive restlessness is starting. I want to get things done, I want to do things. Even writing this article is me being restless, but at least I’m able to do it sitting and resting at home. The body, even though it’s feeling better, is not ready to be pushed to the extent that the mind wants to push it, and that’s a hard thing to come to grips with.

Working backwards to May

For those that are reading my blog and following my YouTube channel, you will notice a big drop off in what I have been producing since about May. Even though I didn’t go to the ER until the early part of June, in May, at NORWAC, the Northwest Astrology Conference, I was having issues that I thought were regular travel stomach stuff.

So looking back, I can see that this last round started in May, compounded, and came to a head in June, just before I was set to go traveling. I got the antibiotics. I got that under control, but the stress of traveling was still to much, even despite that.

Even traveling, and maybe this is just me succumbing to this need to be productive, probably wouldn’t have been that bad if I’d continued my dietary restrictions. After I came back from Tibet, I went straight into trying to eat normally. I think maybe I needed a much longer window of more restorative digestive processes, using more nourishing foods and easier to digest things. I probably should have maintained my diet a little bit more, and maybe that would have saved things.

The big thing in the middle of July that I think ended up sending me into the ER was going to the Olive Garden and having stuffed chicken marsala. That was obviously not the right thing to do. Even though it was more then a month from the last emergency room visit, looking back on it I’m seeing that the body needs more than a month to heal.

Even though the mind is restless, the mind is saying, oh, get back to work, go do things, get out there, be productive, be social, talk to people, make connections with your friends, write more, do more. I like to hike and go on walks, and my mind is saying, get out there, do more excercise, do more, do more. I love food. I see and smell food and want to eat good food, and the mind is saying, oh, the body’s okay, just go ahead and eat, go ahead and eat.

There needs to be a lot more self recognition around understanding when the signals are not normal. A need for me, and for men in general.

Part Two picks this up from further back: Giardia in the forests of Sumatra in my early 20s, the rounds of COVID and what they left behind, and the mindset I think is itself a disease.

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