Chronic Diva

Hello, my intrepid warriors! I’m back for another raw, yet inspiring post. I know many of you out there have been sick for years. Some of you darlings have been struggling your entire life with your autoimmune disorders and chronic pain (I don’t know how you do it!), while the rest of us run the gamut along the timeline of how long we’ve been struggling. I’ve been dealing with my chronic illness for 8 years now. It took me about 4 just to get a diagnosis for three of them and I’m still trying to get the diagnosis for Crohn’s, even though they are treating it like Crohn’s, say it acts like Crohn’s, and it’s unlikely it is anything other than Crohn’s (wait for it) yet they cannot be completely sure that it’s not something else.

In the meantime, we try to do everything right to help ourselves through our illness. We research our illness like the devil so that we eventually become more informed than any doctor, frankly, I think many of us deserve honorary degrees given the depth of knowledge we accumulate. But we don’t just research. Let’s face it even when you are investigating outside WebMD where you are looking at possible death for most of your symptoms (mostly kidding), it is exhausting dealing with the volume of information for out there and so many differing opinions on what those symptoms could mean. You balance this out and tap into how your body works and how those symptoms behave inside of you and what it may mean. We might as well become Sherlock Holmes the way we are trying to connect all the dots and backtrack to the beginning source of all our problems. I think every one of us believes it had to have all started with one thing. Like something in our lives or body had to catalyze all our illnesses and health problems. That it couldn’t just be a random coincidence that at age 36 (just a random age I’m throwing out there) everything suddenly just tanked. I know I am one of those people. I sit there and wonder for hours, like that cat meme where it’s all the figures as he’s thinking how to make the jump? Yeah, that’s me thinking about how this all started. It had to originate with something.

Next on our list of things we try to do right, is keeping ourselves healthy. Many of us endeavour to eat healthy, exercise and even meditate in hopes that one out of the three will lift us from the depths of our misery. But does it? For most of us, the answer is a resounding no. Despite our best attempts at losing weight to make the pain better, eating healthier for various reasons from simply basic health reasons, to boosting our immune system, to even autoimmune guided diets. There are so many reasons people find themselves perusing diets thinking it will help them and it’s devastating when it doesn’t help. Some do reap some benefits and I am not here to tell you not to look for a diet that might help you. Diets can help you even if they don’t help your autoimmune illness. If you are overweight it can help your overall health to lose weight and it can help arthritis and other reasons that some might have chronic pain, to lose excess weight. But if you are going into things looking for a way to alleviate your chronic illness you simply may not find the answer you are looking for. And it’s very frustrating you can try and try to lose weight, be healthy, exercise if you are able and still not feel once ounce better. And you begin to wonder to what end is this all for.

Oh! How about sleep? Chronic illness and chronic pain are notorious for robbing our lives of sleep. We look for ways to sneak more sleep into our lives any way we can and sometimes we can and a lot of times we can’t and even if we can, it may never ultimately help the situation. You can get the 8 hours of sleep and still find yourself smack dab in the middle of a flare. Or you can sleep 14 hours or longer with naps, or be the reverse like me, where sleep is constantly elusive and then you read things like “If you don’t get your sleep, your overall length of life is shortened.” Holy crap on a cracker man! As if I don’t have enough to worry about, I am going to die earlier than expected just because I don’t sleep! That is a lot of stress. And stress, as we all know, can contribute to lack of sleep. And if you have OCD like me, you end up stressing about the stress you are feeling because you can’t sleep, which plunges you further into not sleeping and yeah. It’s a mess. It makes you feel like you can’t do anything right when you are trying so very hard to do everything right.

You can still do everything right, or try to, and suffer from the plague of symptoms that is your chronic illness. It isn’t you, it simply is and you need to remember that some days it’s just out of your hands. You can continue to do what you do to try and alleviate symptoms but forgive yourself and your body if it fails. I always try to stress that when I write is forgiving your body. Your body is ultimately no longer in control. The chronic illness/autoimmune disorder is riding at the helm and your body is like hostage-taking orders. So, if you wake up feeling like crap and all you want to do is sleep and you can take the day off, or maybe take a nap sometime during the day, go for it. Indulge and do what is needed to help yourself through the symptoms. It’s okay.

As always, if you like what you are reading help support an author by donation. It would truly help me able to continue what I do, which is spread awareness about mental health, chronic illness and chronic pain.