Looking in the Mirror

Sometimes when I look in the mirror I don’t recognize the person staring back at me. That’s not to say that I don’t realize it’s my own face, but some how that person staring at me is not truly who I am. That is the issue when you live with a chronic illness, it changes who you are. Now, understand I am not writing this for sympathy, empathy, or any of that I am writing this in hopes that you can better understand what we go through. Living with a chronic illness is one of the hardest things a person will ever have to endure in their lifetime.

See the issue is that with a chronic illness you as an outsider don’t see the pain we are living with, all you see if what we project to the world. The majority of chronic illnesses don’t have visible, outward symptoms or signs. Now, there are a few that do but the majority are what are referred to as invisible diseases. They are invisible because we don’t exhibit outward signs of our pain, of the nerve endings being frayed apart, or any number of things that our organs are doing to themselves and each other. Each day it is a battlefield within my body, I have nerves attacking organs, organs attacking each other, and not enough antibodies to fight any of the raging battles that are on going.

Picture images from wars you have seen of guns being shot and people laying there dying, that is what it is like inside of me. I know that is graphic but it is the truth and sometimes that is the only way to get others to understand what I am dealing with. If you picture an electrical cord that has been frayed and stripped down, that is what my nerves look like. The outside layers of my nerves have been stripped away and the nerves are behaving like an electrical current when it hits water. Then each of the nerves are attacking the spots where they are connected to organs, the skin, or one another. They see the connection spots as the enemy to fight against, not as their home base.

As the nerves are waging their war, the organs are deciding that they don’t agree with the connection spots either. So the organs then start fighting against the nerves at that spot and eventually the spot becomes dead because it has been attacked from both sides. The organs also have declared war on anything that is near them or that even looks like it might come close to them. My stomach for instance at this very moment absolutely hates solid, hard food so when I try to eat something, the stomach rejects it and throws a fit to get it out of its space.

Then we have my legs, I honestly have no real explanation for the pain that they are in but I just know that they hurt constantly. It seems that they don’t really want to be attached to the body any longer so they are waging a war to pull themselves apart from the inside. It’s like my bones are trying to pull away from the muscles and the muscles are wrapping around the bones to keep them there because they don’t want them to leave. The bones don’t care what the muscles want and they are headed out the door at all times. The muscles then throw a fit, seize up around the bones and hold on for dear life.

I give these examples so that you can better understand where we are coming from. See a lot of people with chronic illnesses are faced with the fact that because you can’t see what is going on inside of them, then they aren’t believed. If I can help just one person realize that these diseases are real, they are painful, and we need help then I have done my job. I am not down playing any other disease, I understand that there are horrible other things out there but what people don’t seem to understand is that a lot of times those other things have cures but our diseases don’t. You see because people can’t see our diseases, they don’t get the recognition of other things and there is not enough funding to research cures. All of my chronic illnesses/diseases (I use those words interchangeably) have no cure; in fact the majority of them don’t even have point of origin. The smart doctors and scientists have no idea how or why mine exist, and they sure don’t have a way of fixing or curing them.

I am one of the lucky ones though; I have doctors that have believed me when I have said I am having pain. It took awhile and a few tries at different doctors to get to that point, but I am there now. All of my doctors believe me when I tell them what is going on inside of me and how I feel. They all acknowledge that my diseases are real and they warrant help. There are some doctors out there that don’t believe in my diseases and they weren’t willing to help find answers, so I moved on until I found the ones who would help. Now, my doctors do not by any means have all the answers but they are trying and are willing to help me find them. A lot of people aren’t so lucky and my eternal hope is that more doctors are willing to learn about these chronic illnesses.

All that being said, back to the mirror there are days that I look in there and I have no idea how I got to this point. There are days that I just stare at myself and cry because I am a shell of who I thought I was going to be at this point in my life. There are times where I cannot even recognize the person staring back at me because this wasn’t supposed to be my life. I will be honest; there are days that I yell out to God in absolute anger over what my life has become. I have days where I cry out to God to just take me home and not let me have this pain any longer. I have days where I look at myself and die laughing at what I see because I never thought this would be me and I can’t do anything else but laugh at the absurdity of it all. Then I have those days where I look in the mirror and I am so thankful that I am still here to tell my story. I have days where I think I look so radiant that no one would know I was sick at all. I look at myself with amusement in my eyes because I know that I can still stir up mischief on a good day.

I tell you all this so that you can better understand when some you love comes to you and says they have a chronic illness. I say this to you so that you can have compassion for that stranger at the grocery store that is moving a little bit slower because of their internal pain. I give graphic, horrific details so that you can envision what it is like for your friend who suffers silently. I need just one person to understand so that they can truly believe when someone tells them they have one of these horrible diseases. I ask you to look in the mirror and be so thankful that you are here to learn, that you are around to help someone, and that you know can understand when someone mentions his or her disease. We each have days when we look in the mirror and aren’t sure who is staring back, but we are oh so lucky that we have those days. Give yourself a bit of grace if you don’t recognize the person in the mirror, you are still there and you will shine brightly again.