Overcoming Adversity

When I learned I had a chronic disease, one that had no known cause, let alone cure, I didn’t really grasp it. At first it just seemed like it would eventually go away. Well, as anyone knows, something that is chronic and lifelong does not go away, and I was deep in denial. It took me getting so sick I couldn’t work anymore for me to finally admit that I had a disease that wasn’t going to go away. So, I took a year off on disability to learn how to cope with my disease so I could live my life as normally as possible.

It was easy for me to quickly fall into a depression. My life wasn’t normal, nor did it seem like it ever would be. How could I live a normal life when chronic pain and other symptoms kept cropping up on a steady, if irregular, basis? Who would want to be with someone like me, who was dealing with a crippling and horrifyingly painful condition that most people didn’t even know existed, and half of those who did know thought it was psychological? What job could I hold if I had these terrible sick days where I just couldn’t deal with normal every day life things, let alone function in a job? These were the things that were crippling my thinking and I had to let them go.

The one thing I had to learn right away was that the pain was inevitable, but I didn’t have to let it stop my life. There were ways of dealing with it. Diet, exercise and ibuprofen helped a lot. That managed it; it would never go away but it could be managed. The lesson learned? Pain is unavoidable; misery from it is not. I could feel the pain and be happy, live a relatively normal life, if I kept up my regimen. This was not an easy lesson learned. I had to go through a lot to get there.