When I first came back to the blog, I wrote about my awful experiences with various medications for autoimmune disease. On some levels I feel a lot better without them, but my pain is getting a lot worse, and my energy never did make a full comeback. Back when I wrote that post, my mindset was leaning toward telling the rheumatologist that I didn’t want to try anything else after three different ones being so awful. Now that some time has passed, I am going to ask to try again, because the pain is not conducive to much.
It’s not a fun thing to have to choose between severe pain all the time, or the possibility of medication that makes things so much worse. However, I have things that I want to do, and there are a lot of other things that can be tried, so when I have my appointment in late June, I’ve decided to be brave and give it another go. Surely one of the many medications available will be tolerable by my supremely picky body.
What finally made me decide to continue with treatment is noticing that yet another of my fingers is starting to turn sideways. The incessant body-wide pain was already making me lean in that direction, but seeing yet another joint becoming disfigured is concrete proof to me that there is damage being done that needs to be stopped. In the meantime, I’ll be here as much as I can, and I’m hoping that it’s fairly often. Now that I’ve gotten this all out in the open, the next post will be about something other than my health. It isn’t something that I really like to talk about, but it is part of my life that will be popping up.
For several reasons, I’ve felt almost ashamed to talk about my struggles here. While I do not wish for health issues to make up a large part of this blog, I have decided to be a bit more open about it. There isn’t any shame in it, and that is part of my inner narrative that I am choosing to tell to shut the hell up. All the old voices of the past, and even in our society which cause us to place our value in what we produce, what we can do, how perfect we can make ourselves look can hush. It may be a little later in life, but it’s finally coming clear to me just how wrong those voices are and how to see myself differently.
Of course we should always be doing our best to have a life which is meaningful, but it can’t always be about how much money we make, what possessions we have, and all around being a poster child of materialistic success. Not saying that having nice things is bad, it’s just that as a society we all too often make those things the measure of worthiness in a person. Coming to a realization that I will not be rejoining the rat race has really helped me to see the intrinsic value of people, and it isn’t tied to what they do and what they own. While I’ve never viewed the world in that way, this is a whole new level, because those values had been embedded in me when it came to my own worth. So glad to finally have this fading, as I had a hard time fully loving myself and feeling worthy of acceptance. Here’s to all of us finding our sense of worth.
Do any of you go through this?
