Heads up: this is part of an ongoing series about my experience with GLP-1 medication. If that’s a triggering topic, please feel free to skip. I’m not telling anyone what to do with their body. I just need to process this, and I figure someone out there is more scared than I am and could use the company. Start at the beginning →

I feel the need to explain myself before I disclose the big secret I’ve come here to whisper to the internet. I mean I usually am trying to explain myself before. Cami Explains It All — in regards to who she is and why she does the shit she does — would be a good alternate name for this blog.

Sigh. No it wouldn’t. But I was trying to be clever and it’s early.

I don’t know how to say the things I’m about to say because… there feels like hope.

I took my first GLP-1 shot yesterday. My body did not like having the needle jammed into my stomach three times. But honestly the worst part of it all, the very worst part, is that I spent the entire day bracing for the worst side effects and feelings that could be produced. I was expecting nausea and vomiting to show up 5 minutes after my first little baby dose.

I started getting a headache after a while, but it wasn’t anything that a couple of Excedrin, an hour in a dark room, and constant hydration couldn’t ward off. That barely even counts as a headache in my world.

I had a few moments of light nausea here and there, almost threw up 0 times. Sounds some kind of way for some people, but I don’t usually experience hunger as hunger. I experience it as stomach pain followed by the panicked moment of whether or not I’m going to puke bile before I get a chance to eat.

Not because I am forgetting or intentionally not eating. But because my body just tells me stuff that way instead of the way I’ve been told most others experience hunger.

Every morning I wake up stupid fucking early to take thyroid medication that I have to take on an empty stomach. And every day it’s a little bit of a struggle to keep my pills down.

This morning I think I’m just hungry. I need to wait another 15 minutes before I can have anything more than water, but I find myself thinking today I’ll be able to eat something before I feel pukey.

And you know what, that’s not the only thing.

My joint pain, my constant companion since childhood, seems to have fucked off a bit.

Am I, as a human with multiple chronic illnesses, having a good physical health day randomly in the middle of the complete fucking chaos that is currently going on in our families and the world?

It is this tiny little dose of meds? I don’t know.

But the thing that actually makes me want to cry is that I was able to go up and down my stairs multiple times yesterday without joint pain or subluxation.

I haven’t had a day like that in recent memory. Like two years recent memory. And I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I actually can’t wait until next week so I can see if I just had a miraculously good day or if this is medicine at work.