Hi! My name is Rebecca and I am sick. You’d never believe it (most days) if I didn’t tell you, but I have an autoimmune disease. Why are we so quick to think people have to wear their illnesses on the outside before we believe that they are significant enough to care about? I know the unspoken thing is, that the millions of us in this commuinty want to be heard and we need compassion. As confused as you may be looking at us from the outside, we are just as equally confused on the inside. We don’t understand why our bodies went crazy….we just know that they did.
For those of you who don’t know what the term autoimmune is, it basically means that our bodies fight against us by the way of attacking it’s healthy tissues and organs. Sounds fun, right? I’m actually quite lucky in my dignosis because I really do mean that most days you’d never know I was struggling with something if I didn’t tell you. Only on my worst flare up days, would I ever dare to let you know that I was in any pain.
In my early twenties I was in a car accident. A very bad wreck where it was nothing but God that kept me alive. In fact I walked away from it….to an ambulance who insisted I get checked out. I had bruising, a small fracture in my knee, and a concussion. My friend with me at the time walked away with only some bruising and a few burn marks from the air bag.
A few years from that accident I was still having pain in my leg. A doctor told me he believed that my knee didn’t heal properly, and that was causing the pain. That didn’t seem to make sense considering the pain wasn’t consistent and sometimes it would tingle like when a person’s foot goes to sleep. But, I wasn’t a medical professional so I said, “Okay,” and would continue to get a second opinion.
Seven years of testing and being made to feel like an absolute lunatic, an eye doctor told me, “I see something in your optic nerve.” Never would I have thought that my discharge papers would have read: Digonsis-Multiple Sclerosis. I was thirty-five, I had a seven year old and a ten month old daughter, and my life felt like it got flipped upside down.
Over the course of the next couple of years I still fought with this diagnosis. If it was there, fine, we’ll deal with it, but some doctors said, “lesions are located in the wrong places on my c-spine and in my brain for that dignosis.” I second opinioned myself long enough and I needed treatment no matter the issue. Lesions are now “in the right places” but I’m fortunate that I don’t have many considering that everybody has some.
In 2017 I had two of disks in my cervical spine removed because I had a nerve that was compressed. A year later, I was in pain again. I tried to active in the gym or by going for walks and hikes, but I couldn’t kick the pain. Nothing was really getting rid of it, there were just days that were better than others. Very recently, within the last ninety days, I found out that the pain I had been having stems from my second autoimmune disease: Ankylosing Spondylitis.
With that being said, these are not a death sentence for me. My MS is not the progressive kind, and frankly I’ll likely have more of an issue with AS because my back isn’t in great shape. Steroids are a part of my life now, which make me a little chubbier than I’d like to be, but considering how bad it could be, that’s a bee sting. When I do have pain, I have pain. It can get severe, has brought me to tears, and can last for days sometimes. But I also know this community. Many use walkers, wheelchairs, on pain medication everyday, and don’t have the best prognosis. I have bad days, but I have a pretty great life.
Remember that a lot of people have issues you might not know anything about. Mental health issues, physical health issues, etc. We don’t all wear advertisement signs telling the world our issues. So always be kind, try to be listen and be understanding, and maybe sprinkle some compassion when it’s needed.
-Peace and Love
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