I was only 35 when I was diagnosed with my auto-immune conditions, three of them, to be exact: Rheumatoid Arthritis, Psoriatic Arthritis, and Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis. It was like my body had suddenly decided to wage war against itself and I was the fallout.
I’ve been in more pain than I ever thought I’d have to endure in a lifetime. It’s hard to imagine what life was like before there was pain. If I ever reach a point I get out of pain, it will probably be the happiest day of my life.
I never wanted this life of misery and pain, of dependency, and imprisonment within my own limitations. People don’t understand what it’s like to live a half-life like this. They think everything is a Lifetime movie and that your family and friends will rally around you and help you through it.
Protip: They don’t.
The first year of my illness, I lost more friends than anything. People couldn’t stand the person I’d become. I was enraged and frustrated by my inability to so much as open a bottle without help. I was upset by the sudden futility of my life. I was grief-stricken and staring into the abyss of a life of dependency, when I had always been independent – but all of that suddenly made me a bad person, an unworthy person, a changed person.
I never wanted to be so terrible a person that even my own friends couldn’t stand by me. It makes me wonder, though, had it been cancer or something more traumatic that I was fighting, would they have been more understanding? More lenient? People don’t look at chronic illness and see someone who is sick. They see someone who is apparently fully functioning who just claims to be sick. They never once realize how much pain and how many tears it took to just be a presentable human being. They never once realize how much it costs in pain to spend just an hour or two out with them. They never once realize the days spent crying in anguish as the pain catches up, a punishment for daring to push past our limits.
All I want is to live a normal life, to remember what life without pain is like. I don’t know if that will ever happen in my lifetime. We keep trying this medication and that one, but nothing seems to help. Meanwhile, my body slowly falls apart as the same medication that’s supposed to help me destroys me from within.
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