“I’ll send someone in to schedule the test,” the specialist says to me. “Wait here a moment.” I nod and watch her leave. As the door clicks shut, a sinking, sick, hollow gap grows and groans in my chest. I shrink against the uncomfortable chair, stare at my hands or count the number of tiles on the floor. I don’t look at the posters of disease on the walls. I already read them earlier. It never gets better, this moment after the door shuts and there is only you and the white white room. It never changes. The me who...
I came across the online campaign Suffering the Silence through this PBS article and immediately knew that I wanted to participate. It’s an awesome movement that encourages people with chronic illness to share their stories. I’d highly recommend browsing the Instagram and Twitter hashtag. Scrolling through the pictures, I have found it so encouraging to see other young people discussing the hardest parts of chronic illness. These diseases can be incredibly isolating. And when I see people with multiple diseases, and read the things they’re saying, my spirit lifts a little. I’m reminded that I’m not alone. I haven’t talked...
Dear Body, Well, here we are again, on the night before everything starts to roll. You remember last time, yeah? We were seventeen and they’d taken the bloodwork and there was a crazy Mississippi storm that night. Remember how we curled over and cried a little and then wrote some poetry? Yeah, it sucked – the poetry, and the night. I’m not mad at you. I’m not breaking up with you. Partially because I can’t since, let’s be honest, you are me and I’m just personifying you to make sense of something that can’t be made sense of. (more…)
I originally wrote this for Nearly Christian, after reading the challenging post Easy Like Sunday Morning. I’ve been sitting on it for a few months now, but as NC hasn’t updated recently I figured I would go ahead and share it here. On that cold fall night, I decided enough was enough. It was time to have it out with God. I had just seen a Christian film that touched on grief and emphasized healing. The message (like most Christian media) was uplifting, but I left feeling deeply disturbed. Have you ever noticed that in Christian fiction, everyone gets their...
Let me start off by saying I’m not a professional. I’ve never had a counseling class, and this isn’t a post about “fixing” people. The list below are things that help me through trauma, but they may not be for everyone, and they are not a cure. That being said, I’ve gained a lot of experience in having someone I love in danger. Sometimes I can physically do something about the danger. For instance, if my Type 1 Diabetic sister is taking a shot on her bed and an unobservant teenager starts jumping on it, I can throw that teen...
While in Paris, Mom, Laura and I went to Musée d’Orsay to see the Impressionist paintings. It wasn’t until I saw the first Renoir that I remembered he and I share Rheumatoid Arthritis. When I saw that first painting (I can’t remember which it was), his words rang in my head as if I’d just read them: “The pain passes, but the beauty remains.” (more…)
I’ve just passed my six year anniversary of the first time I felt symptoms of Rheumatoid Arthritis. Honestly I spend most of my time doing my best to not dwell on this stuff, but I feel like I need to look into the past and share it. Everyone’s journey is important, even if it is sucktastic sometimes, and maybe hearing mine will help others with theirs. (more…)
If a friend or a loved one has Rheumatoid Arthritis, there are a lot of little ways you can show support—including giving the occasional present! Below you’ll find of a list of helpful gifts you can give to show you care. From the extremely practical to the extremely thoughtful, find a gift for your friend below… (more…)
Today I was walking to the library, which is about five minutes from my townhouse, and I couldn’t make it. I had to stop and rest. After about ten steps from my townhouse, that autoimmune fatigue started settling over me like a boulder. The best way I can describe this sort of fatigue is that I can feel every heartbeat sluggish and heavy. I have to concentrate on taking deep breaths, and every one is like breathing through a straw. If I close my eyes, I become dizzy. The pressure on the back of my head makes a migraine buzz...
One thing that fascinates me, perhaps in a morbid way, is how disability and disease effects every part of a person’s life–especially when it’s not an physically obvious diseases. Today I read Nancy Mairs’s essay Disability, which I’d highly recommend. One of my favorite quotes comes at the end: But it will be a good bit easier psychologically if you are accustomed to seeing disability as a normal characteristic, one that complicates but does not ruin human existence. Achieving this integration, for disabled and able-bodied people alike, requires that we insert disability daily into our field of vision: quietly, naturally,...
