Every day of the past 5 months I've been facing a health condition, which has wreaked havoc on my personal, social, and work life. The first few weeks were spent in denial, followed by weeks of disbelief and anger, feeling powerless in the weeks after. Currently, 5 months in - I consider myself caught in a triad of either anger, bargaining, or acceptance. The cloud of depression is not far from rolling in too, though.
It's tough to stay positive, when all the plans you had for the coming 3-4 years are put on hold - some surely indefinitely - due to your life suddenly being dictated by a chronic illness. Technically it can't even be considered a chronic illnes yet though. For an illness to be considered chronic it must persist for 6 months. 1 month to go. If everything I've been dealing with over the past 5 months chooses to go away - all by itself - 4 weeks and 6 days from now, then I've just been sick for a really long time.
Areas of my life continue to be affected by the blast radius of this chronic pain shit show. The crater it has left is of considerable size. The past 5 months have been everything but normal. I find limitations in my mobility in all aspects of my life - be it a bike ride, hiking, or sex. I find cognitive limitations because a lot of thinking. listening, talking can increase the pain. It's probably the toughest riddle I've been faced with. How the fuck do I work with this? What now? It's the toughest thing I've had to navigate in a partnership and I'm grateful for the way we've been navigating this together so far. But it's shit.
I hope it all stops and is over before the 6 months have passed. Because then I could look back on all this, laugh and return to and effortless sex life and my 40h job with good pay. That's what I want. I don't want to have to learn what it means to exist in yet another margin of society - the chronically ill. From what I've seen so far it's an existance that is marked by a constanst state of bureaucratic hurdling, having to prove the legitamicacy of ones issue by filling out forms and having the experts weigh in on the final score. I'd be so busy, filling out forms and calling people, I'd have no time to be sick. Problem solved? Maybe my form-filling anxiety will scare the pain away before the 6 months have passed.