📣 Discussion Topic: How do you manage work when living with chronic pancreatitis? What changes have you made?

[Skye_MC]

Hi all! 👋 One thing that we've heard from patients is the need to make adjustments to their job in order to better manage pancreatitis. Have you had to make changes to your career? What tips do you have for balancing your health with your work day? Feel free to share below! 👇

[deniseinmilden]

Good morning!Sorry I've run out of time to reply to this now, other than to thank you hugely for the excellent webinar on CP and bone density. Absolutely superb!

I encourage people to watch it here:

mission-cure.org/can-pancre...

More on work another day coz that's what I've got to do now! 😃

[deniseinmilden]

I am a mixed farm/estate manager by trade and can/could/have run big dairy units, cattle, sheep and all the cropping for their needs, plus looked after the staffing and all farm infrastructure. Despite other chronic health issues and a heart arrhythmia!

Still self-employed, I have had to give up this exciting career and now just do a bit of cleaning, gardening and caring, mostly for older people with health issues as they are more likely to be understanding.

I think the hardest thing is being motivated to go to work for people who are going to treat me like I am insignificant or incapable - especially when I know I have greater skills and experience than they do - as proved by their poor staff management of me - who is the most willing and capable person they could wish for, if only they'd step back from treating me like an idiot!

To try cope with this I work for a wide range of people doing various jobs so nothing is too hideous for too long! The jobs are OK it's the attitude of the people who don't know what chronic illnesses are like that are awful - basically abusive because they can be. Other people are lovely and I look forward to doing anything and everything for them!

I'm doing bitty jobs to enable me to keep going: in theory I can choose to take on extra hours or not - but the reality is I generally take all the work I'm asked to do and just vary how much I do for myself to cope.

By only doing a few hours at a time it is inefficient at earning money but does enable me to sleep between jobs if I need to. I rarely can go more than a few hours without sleeping and if I do it usually wrecks me for the next day.

I try to work as close to home as possible so I don't waste precious time/energy/money in travelling. I can work until I'm barely able to exist and then go straight home, and to sleep, in only a few minutes. That way I don't have to still be well enough to drive far when I finish.

I try to have jobs where there is a loo readily available.

I have almost no immunity to bugs/illness (probably mostly to do with gut microbiome but there are other factors too) so usually work on my own, outside, or with/for others who are also immunocompromised or are very low risk (also live/work on their own) so I am at less risk of picking up bugs.

I'm used to high biosecurity and doing risk assessments from my farm work so I automatically apply that to everyday life and work situations. Covid made very little difference to me as I have to live like that anyway - and always have done.

I am always much worse in the 6 winter months from October to March and I often get SIBO and/or a pancreatitis flare at the beginning of October, resulting in loads of secondary infections and this wrecks me for the winter. I can be as careful as possible in September and nothing seems to protect me and prevent it happening! I'd love some ideas for this! I spend each winter struggling to do anything and losing money, and then every summer working every hour to make up. I wish there was some way of being able to balance things out a bit.

I was much better able to mentally cope with losing my career once I saw the loss of it as bereavement for the life I had and bereavement for the person I was (because my career was 24/7 it defined me and I wanted it to!).

I have always steered myself by the poem "If" by Rudyard Kipling and by the ethos of the 1960's, Hayley Mills film, "Pollyanna".