The Medical Paradox

It's no secret how I feel about modern medicine. While it has saved my life more than a few times, when I got sick with something no doctor understood, modern medicine's apathy almost took me down. Hindsight is so clear, and looking back nine years later I can contribute a significant amount of my suffering with chronic illness to a lack of medical acceptance. Being sick sucks. Being sick for a lifetime sucks harder. And being sick for a lifetime, and nobody believing you, well, it doesn't take a genius to point out that's like taking a slow boat ride to crazy.

For so many years just thinking about the way doctors dismissed, degraded, belittled and judged me used to send me into an epic meltdown of Chernobyl proportions. Luckily my heart and soul have healed a little, and my mind is determined to evade negativity, so I can now talk about it without anger-hives breaking out all over my face. It's what happened, and getting all hot and bothered over a past I cannot change is futile. Had I not found a way to turn the disease train around, however, I don't know if such a detached, observant point of view would be mine.

There is no substitute for a competent and compassionate doctor for anyone with chronic illness. Tons of malfunctions are occurring within many different bodily systems, which frequently aren't the same for any two patients. Once I found a doctor interested in treating me as a patient, not just a disease profile, my symptoms became far more manageable. Of course the bevy of prescription medications that go along with modern medicine's theory on how to treat chronic illness created another nightmare entirely, but I didn't know there was another way. Now I do. My doctor has become someone who I see for health maintenance, not someone I expect to heal me. She makes sure my thyroid is balanced and metabolic panel in the healthy range. Every other bit of progress came about when I stopped obsessing over what was making me sick, and started investing my efforts in being healthy.

Thanks for joining,
Leah

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Back In The Saddle

Image
Well I got back on the horse. What else am I going to do? Take a long walk off a short pier or go play in traffic? So here I sit ready to try again. Raw, insecure and uncertain, but here I am. As I sort through the disillusionment in my mind I realize many of the sanity-saving tools I employed along the way got dropped in the dust a while back. I fell into my old behavior patterns. I allowed negativity and demands to infiltrate my sense of responsibility to myself. It's a big job, to regain my lost ground. I can do it, though. Not all at once, perfectly or on the first try, but it can be done. Of course this requires a significant amount of isolation and reflection. Accepting some will grumble over the selfish action of me taking care of me. Realizing that is not my problem. In fact, expecting myself to get a handle on my issues and then resume a level of interdependent living is exactly why I wound up back here in the first place.  I have finally accepted I cannot go back....
Read more

Waiting On the World to Care

Image
This blog has sat silent for many moons. For eight full ones, more or less, I've been imprisoned in an exile of my own creation. Initially I was so angry about my health relapse I didn't know what to say, other than to hurl epic amounts of fury at my keyboard. I had no solutions, no answers, and nothing positive to contribute. So instead of spewing hate all over the permanent cloud of internet technology, I donned the hair shirt of self-flagellation and turned that anger inward. It's been a horrible, terrible, no good, very bad eight months. As I got sicker and sicker, I got madder and madder. The angrier I became, the more I sequestered myself. I refused to talk about my problems or how I felt. It seemed pointless, like it didn't matter. Nobody could do anything about it or begin to comprehend my reality. There was just me, an isolated island of misery, who wanted to do anything but talk about being an isolated island of misery. But nobody understood that either. I...
Read more

Incurable Fog

Image
One day while driving down the street I forgot where I was. Mind you I just left Target and was headed toward home so had certainly been there before, but in that instant I couldn't have told you where I was on the planet if my life depended on it. I had to pull over and cry for a while, gnashing my teeth and pulling my hair over the fact that I was thirty years old and becoming so sick with something so unfixable, I was literally losing my mind. Flash forward a few years to when I had settled into the reality of living with fibromyalgia. Working retail was a painful necessity that was quickly running its course, so I set about trying to figure what on earth to do to earn a living. Naturally, this required me to take a Spanish course at the local community college. Not because I wanted to earn money off my non-existent Spanish 1 skills, but because I desperately needed to know if my brain was capable of learning and retaining new information, and I took French in high school.  I wo...
Read more