It just dawned on me why I have such trouble being sick. I feel like crap and I can’t tell the difference between ‘I feel lousy and it will get better with time’ and ‘I feel lousy and I am going to die (or some variation there of)’. I swing between the two extremes and get so lost. I alternate between doing a good job of taking care of myself to just giving up.
And I have it in my mind that being sick clears up after a couple of days. I swear that is the way it used to be and I feel should be.
Whoa.
That was a revelation. Same here.
I can’t get used to the fact that I will never be “normal” again.
On the days I feel good? I sometimes find myself thinking “oh! Maybe it’s over now!”
Dammit.
It took me a long long time to get to the point where I didn’t go through the “I can get better” with my blood sugar thing. I can make it different but getting rid of it will never be an option. It has only been 22 years with it. I would say the last 5 are when I have truly accepted it.
Now I am working on how I handle any pain sort of thing. It is sort of interesting to watch it unfold.
There is so many things that are caught in the “small is the same as large so all much be bad” mode of dealing. I am still surprised when another one show up in the group.
I’m still pondering the revelation that I will never “wake up one day and be over this illness.”
I’m not sure I can live believing that. I think I have to keep striving to make it not so… even if that’s never achievable.
Aristotle once posited (paraphrased) that while man could never achieve the divine in the course of his lifetime, he still must strive to achieve it.
I think, in weird ways, that I must keep trying to believe that at some point I will wake up “well” again.
10 years ago, I was lying on my back, on disability, wondering if I’d ever be pain-free again. More than that though, if I’d ever be able to walk again, sit again, and lead a semi-normal non-drugged-into-catatonic life. I had to believe I could. I did. I’m not 100% now. I know intellectually I never will be… But I’m infinitely better than I was.
The fibro has been getting worse. But in that, the back has still gotten better. So, something must be working right. Now I will take on the fibro and the arthritis. I will find ways to beat them. I have to. Thousands of tomorrows of “it won’t ever change” don’t appeal to me.
((hug))
I didn’t think I would ever get to the point where never getting over this was an ok thing. But I have. And it isn’t giving up learning to deal with it and making it better. It is giving up trying to fix it.
I have accepted that I have a blood sugar issue that doesn’t show up on any tests and the doctors for the most part don’t have a clue about it and probably never will. It is not life threatening but really annoying. I am learning that is just me. I have my eyes shake and the docs don’t have a clue. I have gotten to the point it no longer matters to me if it never goes away. It is now a part of who I am and I have different ways of dealing with it.
I have gotten to a point where my eyes don’t shake. No idea why it comes and goes but when it comes back, I will know how to deal with it until it does something new. I have gotten to the point where I can survive just fine on one meal a day. Ok I can’t be social, I don’t move around much and things become overly dramatic in my life but I am not restricted to eating 6 times a day. I have gotten to the point where I can eat sugar. It is like booze to me and I am very grateful the cravings seem to be able to stop themselves because otherwise I would be heading to a 12 step program the way I treat it.
I strive to get to a place I want to go. I don’t bother with trying to understand it and make it go away anymore. I strive to learn to live with it and around it.
By all means, keep working at it and keep striving. And if fighting the thought of “it will never change” helps, then fight it. I just found that without looking, I had stopped fighting that thought and that I was ok with it.
My mom still fights it and wants me to try almost every crackpot theory she comes up with. OK they are not all crackpot theories but they have as much chance as working as anything I have tried and I just don’t have the energy to keep working on fixing it rather than living with it. Her latest is that I am allergic to everything and that is why my energy levels drop. That I have MCS. I know someone with MCS and I don’t even come close to holding a candle to her. I might have some of it but it is not the root of the blood sugar issue.
Who knows, maybe it is my mom doing the fighting that moved me to just accepting and working with what I have. I am a lot more content and less frustrated than I was before. Maybe you might reach the same point in another 10 years. It took me 20.
I have suspected at times that I may have MCS. But it was diagnosed as Fibromyalgia, arthritis, and allergies. At this point, who knows.
I suspect much of what is wrong with me can be tied to 20 years of smoking cigarettes as well. With all of the bizarre chemicals they put in those, I would not be surprised at all if it triggered some sort of latent genetic defect.
I would be “okay” I guess if it weren’t getting worse with age rather than manageable.
In 20 years, at the rate things are going, I will be lucky if I can walk, let alone get out of bed.