I have a Chronic & Incurable Illness. Do you to know precisely what “chronic illness” means. It means there is no cure. There is no end. You have no choice but to deal. And when that gets too hard, you dig deeper and find strength you didn’t know you had, then you deal some more. There literally is no choice. When you think you’re out of strength, you find more. The human spirit can prove amazing. Think of the hardest athletic event you can. A marathon? An Ironman triathlon? The Tour de France? Sailing around the world? All of these have a finish line, a limit, a time period that eventually allows you to say, “I did it, I can rest now”. Chronic illness is harder than all of those. Someone With a chronic illness can’t drop out of this race. You have no coach. No one handing you a medal. There is no off season. You just keep fighting. You’re not used to this. When healthy people get a cold and you know it’s going to be over in 2 weeks. You feel horrible, but each day you feel a little bit better, you focus a little less on your discomfort and a little more on being normal. You have an understanding that this is going to end, like it always does. You break your leg. You can’t walk for a summer. You give up your summer activities, you can’t go swimming, you get strange tan lines. But each week, you get closer to getting out of your cast. And once you’re out, you get stronger and stronger. Forget everything you know about sickness and pain. You can’t comprehend disease with no end until you’ve lived it, and when, as a patient, this concept hits you, it hits hard. But because of this, because you are left in this situation without an opt-out button, you become so strong. Stronger than you ever imagined, and wiser too. You don’t associate your condition with weakness (although this is real, it’s not lasting). You associate it with resilience, strength, empowerment. The innate knowledge that we have it in us to survive, and we know because we’ve faced it. Call on the quote “You never know how strong you are until being strong is the only choice you have”, and understand it is truer than true, for us. Not even endurance athletes can claim this. They don’t know strength like we do, because pushing through is not an event for us- it is life. Through it all, we keep a humble sense of pride and accomplishment. We don’t get a medal or our picture in the paper, but we get a stronger sense of ourselves, and maybe even the chance to inspire the next person.
Posted on: Mon, 21 Apr 2014 22:04:16 +0000
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