My birthday is this weekend and I only want one thing: to see my girlfriend. Shannon and I haven’t seen each other in nearly six years. Since our last visit, we’ve tried numerous times to see each other, but we’ve been too sick to make the 2,000 mile trip. Lately, my health has improved enough …
I skipped a month. For the last eight years, I have posted on this blog at least once a month. I did so because I enjoyed it. I loved crafting my thoughts and feelings into words and phrases. I still do. But for the last several months, perhaps even longer, I have been struggling to …
It’s eight in the morning and I haven’t slept yet. In one corner of my room, I can hear the low rattle of my desktop mini fridge. In another corner, I can see the piercing green light from my air purifier. These, among other things, do not help me sleep. After more than a full …
In the more than a decade that I’ve been sick, I’ve experienced just about every level of my illness. At various times, I’ve been near death. At other times, I’ve been well enough to function almost like a healthy person. I’ve also been stuck in the middle, as I am now, wondering what will happen …
For years, I’ve been wanting to update my chronic illness and disability website. Partly because I’ve always envied people with websites that have fancy graphics and animations, and partly because, well, you and all the other lovely people who read my blog deserve a more modern experience. Until recently, I thought I could create (and …
It’s been a rough year. I think we can all agree on that, so I thought I’d share some good news—my health has been improving lately. The other day I got out of bed and stood up three times in the span of a few hours, the most I’ve done in my walking rehabilitation in …
If there’s one thing that I’ve struggled with the most while I’ve been sick, it’s finding a balance between doing things I enjoy and doing things that don’t make me sicker. It’s especially hard when almost everything I do either steals my energy, fills my muscles with pain, or makes me feel like I’m going …
It’s hard for me to fault people like this, people who try to go about their jobs and daily lives, unfazed by the reality of a deadly virus. It’s hard for me to fault them because, once upon a time, I did the same thing.
What is a pity party, anyway? Well, let me tell you . . . Have you ever had something go wrong and then it snowballed into a million other things that went wrong? If so, you probably know what I’m feeling right now. And therefore you probably don’t need to ask what is a pity …
Warning: This post is about depression and suicide ideation. I knew early on in my illness that it could last a long time — years, maybe decades. I hoped it wouldn’t, of course, but as I often do, I feared the worst. So, when faced with the daunting thought of being indefinitely sick, I made …