Health Problems

A surprisingly high number of my friends and I are wracked with health problems. Most of us aren't out of our 30s yet, but nonetheless experience a variety of ailments that can have catastrophic effects on quality of life, employment, and even eventually even cause death. My own ailments include autism, depression, diabetes, gastrointestinal motility disorder, outdoor allergies that have actually gotten worse with age, low testosterone, and I suspect carpal tunnel, although I haven't checked into that one yet. Friends can lay claim to thyroid conditions, ulcerative colitis, chronic pain, asthma, orthopedic issues, and more. Life lived with poor health is markedly different than life lived with good health and most of the conditions I mention aren't curable. They may be managed with medication, therapy, and the like, but they take their toll just the same. It makes one think about things in a way most don't.

People talk about the young having no sense of mortality. Well, that's not true when you live with chronic conditions. Even those conditions that probably won't kill you give you a less than subtle hint about what it'll feel like when the systems necessary to live start to fail. Every cough that won't go away, every blood sugar reading that's too high, every time the colon misbehaves, every time the pain won't stop, and every time an invisible force in the body or mind betrays you and keeps you from living the life you want, you think about death. It is a constant struggle to put energy into keeping up morale and doing whatever is necessary to manage your conditions as best medical science knows how. That struggle is a draining one and just accomplishing the necessary tasks necessary for getting through your day can be a Herculean effort. Healthy people don't want to acknowledge this because it reminds them of their own mortality and they find it depressing.

When people with chronic health problems talk to one another, it can turn into just measuring misery dicks. What I've come to understand is that there is no real measure of who's more miserable and, even if there was, it shouldn't matter. We've all come into life as the shopping cart with the shitty wheel. The correct response to ailments not shared by oneself is simply to be compassionate. I have friends with chronic pain so severe they're not employable. While I'm not employable either, I don't think of myself as their equal this way. To sit there as the body tortures itself because of something as fickle as weather systems, knowing that the drugs can only do so much and that it will never really end must be an endless grind of devastation and frustration. Feeling sorry for yourself is okay. Hell, I feel sorry for myself and I feel sorry for my friends when their health is poor in ways beyond my experience. Admitting that it sucks never being well holds no shame.

-Frank