The Butterfly Project© 2009
All rights reserved.
All rights reserved.
The more serious the illness, the more important it is for you to fight back, mobilizing all
your resources – spiritual, emotional, intellectual, physical. –Norman Cousins
I like to joke that I’m really just a shell. I have had everything not completely essential (heart, liver, stomach) surgically removed. I don’t know why I was born with so many non-functioning parts, but that’s the hand I was dealt, so I have learned to live with it.
I know the pain of being chronically ill. I know the depression that comes when you want to just feel normal and don’t. I know the desperation that comes from hoping that you will feel better and finding instead, you feel worse.
We all know people who are ill. They usually tell you about it in great detail every chance they get. They will wax on about all the things that are wrong with them until, at some point, you stop listening and wonder why they keep talking about it. That’s the thing about being sick. You don’t realize what effect it has on you until you are sick and you can’t get well.
After my latest round of surgery, I came to the point where I realized that no amount of complaining was going to make me feel better and the sympathy factor from other people was all used up ~ and then some. I started to pay attention to what I was focusing on and found, to my horror, that I was one of those complainers that needed to find a new subject.
Now, I’m not making light of anyone who has illness in their life. Lord knows, I have enough experience in that area. What I am trying to say is that there is a different way of dealing with it and it works for me.
If someone asks how I am feeling, which could be pretty awful, I can either go into the myriad of symptoms that I have, or I can just say that “I’m holding my own.” After all ~isn’t that the truth? I’d like to complain about everything I’m feeling and elicit some kind of sympathetic response from another human being, but what do I gain? What do they gain? When I want to complain, I tell God how I’m feeling in all the gory details. He is always sympathetic and endlessly patient. I have found that works just as well and I still have a friend or two who will actually call me.
Chronic illness is not something to take lightly. It can and will control your entire life if you let it. The bills alone are enough to send you over the edge, but there is life outside the illness. I think that for me, letting the illness control my life was even more damaging than the illness itself. By doing that, I was letting the illness win.
Yes, there are days when I am sick. Yes, there are times that I cry. Yes, there are times when the very act of getting up in the morning seems more that I have the strength for, but when all is said and done, it is my desire to look back and say I may have had some setbacks, I may not always have been 100%, but what defined me was not how I was feeling, but who I was in spite of it.
your resources – spiritual, emotional, intellectual, physical. –Norman Cousins
I like to joke that I’m really just a shell. I have had everything not completely essential (heart, liver, stomach) surgically removed. I don’t know why I was born with so many non-functioning parts, but that’s the hand I was dealt, so I have learned to live with it.
I know the pain of being chronically ill. I know the depression that comes when you want to just feel normal and don’t. I know the desperation that comes from hoping that you will feel better and finding instead, you feel worse.
We all know people who are ill. They usually tell you about it in great detail every chance they get. They will wax on about all the things that are wrong with them until, at some point, you stop listening and wonder why they keep talking about it. That’s the thing about being sick. You don’t realize what effect it has on you until you are sick and you can’t get well.
After my latest round of surgery, I came to the point where I realized that no amount of complaining was going to make me feel better and the sympathy factor from other people was all used up ~ and then some. I started to pay attention to what I was focusing on and found, to my horror, that I was one of those complainers that needed to find a new subject.
Now, I’m not making light of anyone who has illness in their life. Lord knows, I have enough experience in that area. What I am trying to say is that there is a different way of dealing with it and it works for me.
If someone asks how I am feeling, which could be pretty awful, I can either go into the myriad of symptoms that I have, or I can just say that “I’m holding my own.” After all ~isn’t that the truth? I’d like to complain about everything I’m feeling and elicit some kind of sympathetic response from another human being, but what do I gain? What do they gain? When I want to complain, I tell God how I’m feeling in all the gory details. He is always sympathetic and endlessly patient. I have found that works just as well and I still have a friend or two who will actually call me.
Chronic illness is not something to take lightly. It can and will control your entire life if you let it. The bills alone are enough to send you over the edge, but there is life outside the illness. I think that for me, letting the illness control my life was even more damaging than the illness itself. By doing that, I was letting the illness win.
Yes, there are days when I am sick. Yes, there are times that I cry. Yes, there are times when the very act of getting up in the morning seems more that I have the strength for, but when all is said and done, it is my desire to look back and say I may have had some setbacks, I may not always have been 100%, but what defined me was not how I was feeling, but who I was in spite of it.
