I rehearse conversations

[kiya]

(I'm wondering now if I do this more at the moment because of the relapse.) But in any case, one of the things that loops in my head on and off is "How to talk to the doctor about how I feel."

One of the phrases that keeps popping up in search of refinement is, roughly, "artan_eter put me on the standard herbal treatments for this in TCM. This has helped me a lot, so I am merely tired, cranky, forgetful, and in a lot of pain." (artan_eter commented that he would consider "this is a vast improvement, bringing me up to barely functional" to be important medical data as a health care practitioner....)

The interesting/frustrating/undescribable thing about the relapse is, okay. A lot of this stuff I thought was basically normal, that I was just not good at dealing with the normal price of being an embodied entity. That other people just didn't want to complain about the aches like I did, because they had some higher level of stoicism or endurance or something. That other people just Protestant Work Ethicked their way out of the exhaustion and the memory lapses and other stuff.

And a more-or-less year with none of this being a significant issue means that I have had a vision of a world where this crap isn't actually normal. Which means that it's worth being angry about the pain, about the mind fog, about the everything, because I don't have to live this way.

Other people aren't just not wusses about how hard it is to stand up, some of them actually have working knees. Other people actually can remember things they need to do for more than a minute per reminder, even. It's not just that I'm a special-snowflake self-absorbed flaky jerk, it's that these are symptoms of the sort of nonconsensually suicidal body I have.

I am all full of italics. But.

Comments

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Yep.

All the "invisible disabilities" are different, but they all have a component where the disability is invisible to you, yourself, so you assume it is a MORAL failing, rather than Hashimoto's, or bipolar, or depression, or fibromyalgia, or whatever. If you are missing a leg or something, first, that's a lot less universally debilitating than what you're going through, and second, it's an obvious difference that you can account for.

Your situation is a lot more debilitating than a missing leg, and you didn't get to grow up SEEING that everybody else has two legs.