It sucks
to be acutely ill on top of having a chronic illness.
But it is
also in some ways liberating in that, you are, in some ways, in the same
position as someone who isn’t chronically ill.
You get a cold or a cough or a sore throat (or all of the above) and you
go to the doctor. You can easily point
out what’s wrong. And usually doctors
can usually pretty quickly figure out what’s going on.
It can be
very complicated, and yet, it can be so uncomplicated.
Diagnosing
the cold, flu, sinus infection, strep throat, and many other acute conditions,
is so much easier than diagnosing illnesses like lupus and rheumatoid
arthritis.
You leave the
doctor with a plan, usually a rather simple one, and you feel better in a few
days.
None of
this try this awful treatment and it may
or may not work. Or it might pose a risk to your future
children, but that’s just pennies in the grand scheme of things.
I am sick
of being complicated.
Sick of
being sick.
Sick upon
sick of being sick.
I wish
every doctor’s appointment was in and out just like that. But those are the exceptions rather than the
rule.
And
obviously, being chronically ill and acutely ill could mean that you are in
danger of getting really sick from something that would only be a blip on the
radar of a healthy person.
And in
reality, what would take a “normal”, healthy person two days to get over, took
me over a week.
A cold is
just a cold, but you have to be super-vigilant to make sure that it doesn’t
morph into something worse.
It’s
annoying when your system just can’t seem to shake something off. It lingers.
It’s like enough already.
You just
want it to be gone, but then, even when you’ve been restored to your previous
state of health, you aren’t healthy.
It’s great that you can be “cured” of acute ailments, but many ailments
remain. So unlike “normal”, healthy
people, you continue to go to the doctor even once you are “well”, or at least,
not acutely ill.
And I do worry that when I go to student health for things like this, that they don’t understand how important it is to consider the whole picture. It might work for healthy people to look at each acute health issue as being in isolation of everything else. But for those of us who are chronically ill, it’s important that our usual health issues are considered when treating something acute.