Happy Friday! Hopefully my Friday is going better than my Thursday did. Chronic condition flare ups suck. Stuff I wanted to get done didn’t get done, some things that needed to get done, didn’t get done. Not to mention brain fog and boredom.
May is Chronic Illness awareness month, and May 12 is Fibromyalgia awareness day. I have several Chronic illnesses, which is actually pretty common, if you have one, getting diagnosed with another, or 3 or 4 others, is pretty normal.
I have FND, which I’ve posted about pretty extensively in the past. I have Graves disease, and though I no longer have a living thyroid, it is causing other issues now, like chronic wounds. I have asthma and COPD, most people know about asthma. You can get COPD from many things, not just smoking. I’ve never smoked, but I have lung damage from asthma, bronchitis and pneumonia as well as from working in drive-thrus and being exposed to exhaust fumes for decades. I also have arthritis in my hands, knees, shoulders, hips and spine. I also have diabetes, primarily due to a med for my asthma and COPD. My base pain is what most people would consider a 4 or 5. Chronic fatigue is a big issue, as is chronic brain fog which affects memory and cognitive ability.
When you have chronic illnesses, people say things “well at least it’s not cancer” or “at least it’s not terminal”. And yet, consider the implications of living in pain, fatigued, and with brain fog for the rest of the decades of your life. Some people explain it as being awake for 3 days with insomnia and then getting the flu while working 12 hour shifts in a mine. That’s your life, forever. You will have some better days and some worse days when you can’t even get out of bed for more than an hour, or enough to go to the bathroom. Don’t get me wrong, cancer is bad, it’s a horrible disease, and no one should have to suffer with that, it’s something no one would actually want. But Chronic illness is a different kind of bad. It never goes away, it’s not terminal, so it’s a LONG term disease. If you’re sick, people are compassionate, they wait for you to get better, they bring you things to help, they understand if you are slow, sluggish, snappy.
If you have chronic illness, people are compassionate, for a little while. But they forget, they become less patient, they keep expecting you to ‘get better’. And when you don’t, they blame you for it. If you have to cancel appointments, events, meet ups, they blame you. If you can’t get out of bed, you’re told to ‘suck it up’ to ‘stop being lazy’, and that it ‘can’t be that bad’.
Many doctors and nurses ignore your symptoms, or blame all new symptoms on your chronic illness rather than considering that there may be another cause. People with chronic illnesses are more likely to be gaslit and told to seek counciling because it’s ‘all in their head’. People with chronic illnesses are more likely not to have other disease diagnosed, like cancer, kidney stones, or gall stones, until things are way beyond the early stages and harder to treat, partly because, when you’re in pain all the time, a new pain will go unnoticed for a while. And partly because doctor’s automatically attribute new pain to just another flare up.
As you can see by Itzl's concerned look, this group is for us to check in at to let people know we are alive, doing OK, and not affected by such things as heat, blizzards, floods, wild fires, hurricanes, tornadoes, power outages, or other such things that could keep us off DKos. If you're not here, or anywhere else on DKos, and there are adverse conditions in your area (floods, heatwaves, hurricanes, etc.), we are going to check up on you. If you are going to be away from your computer for a day or a week, let us know here. We care!
