Posts tagged “Chronic Illness”
A life of only suffering isn’t
Endurance is possible, but endurance on its own does not equal a full, contributing life. Our purpose in life is not, cannot be, simply to suffer. From Carlyn Zwarenstein’s Opium Eater: The New Confessions.
Legitimate illness
What makes something a disease? And why would some people with migraine fight to have migraine recognized as a disease? Locating migraine in the brain is believed to alleviate personal responsibility, a dynamic that advocates think is important after decades of medical practitioners telling patients that their personalities caused their pain. Identifying migraine as genetic […]
How the expectation of relief changes pain
Pain is a complex experience …I enjoy the waiting. Once I have decided that today is going to be a tramadol day, and I’ve given myself a deadline before which I absolutely will not cave in and take it, my experience of pain is transformed. Rather than grinding and hopeless, it feels charged, electric. The […]
Migraine: a journal sample
May 19, 2018 I want to get up every day and feel okay or even well. To have energy and some expectation of getting things done. I don’t want to be disabled. I feel like life is passing me by, like I don’t do anything, like my life doesn’t matter. I say that I know […]
It is endured and then it is gone and you wish it had been so much more
Given the ease with which health infuses life with meaning and purpose, it is shocking how swiftly illness steals away those certainties. It was all I could do to get through moment to moment, and each moment felt like an endless hour, yet days slipped silently past. Time unused and only endured still vanishes, as […]
Ill living
Once, when I was much much younger, I told someone I trusted that every day I chose to live. I thought this person might understand something of what it was to live with chronic migraine. But they ordered a wellness check and our interactions turned achingly distant and coldly professional. I am reading the October […]
Why I can’t write a good personal essay | Tenure, She Wrote
I wrote about how my understanding of disability has shifted from internal to external and how that’s affected my ability to get support. A little smarts and hard work and luck can’t make my chronically ill body “productive.” Even if they did, it would only make it alright for me – and that’s not good […]