For those of you waiting for me to have a breakdown, it finally happened. I don’t say that in a sarcastic, dramatic, or shitty way; I say it because honestly, I’ve been waiting too. I’ve been waiting for my MS diagnosis to really hit me. Today, it finally did, literally and figuratively.
Today, despite being exhausted and stuck in some sort of steroid withdrawal mental funk, I committed to working on laundry. I dragged myself out of bed, stayed in my pajamas, and got started.
I made pretty decent progress, but courtesy of chronic illness, I didn’t make it through the whole pile. So I started putting things back into baskets and loading the baskets into my closet when my foot gave out and I went forehead-first into one of the cat circles in our room (pictured above).
And I started SOBBING.
Not because it hurt that bad, but because I can’t complete simple tasks alone anymore, and apparently walking normally was out of the question today.
So I sat on my closet floor and cried.
Then, because I have MS and have been struggling to swallow lately, I started choking, which made me cry even harder because apparently today I couldn’t even cry normally.
And THEN I had to lay down because MS tapped out and POTS tapped in. My heart rate was in the 140s, I felt like I was going to have a seizure, and my body was completely done with me for the day.
All of this to say, and I don’t mean to scare anyone, but enjoy the little things you love and the little shit that you absolutely hate doing. Enjoy it for the people like me out there struggling to do it or who are unable to do it on their own. But mostly enjoy it for yourself.
The disabled community is one that you can join at anytime without warning. This could be due to chronic illness or age or any number of things.
So far in my journey with grief related to my chronic illness it has never been the big stuff like I thought it would be. I thought it would be my wedding. I thought it would be changing the order of the dances at my wedding because I was having seizures.
Now, don’t get me wrong that sucked!
But every time I’ve truly sat down and cried, really cried, it’s been over household chores. Over how much effort it takes to do something that used to require none. Over not having the energy to go do something simple that I desperately wanted to do.
And it’s not just the physical side of things either.
No, no, no.
It’s searching for words I can’t remember. It’s losing the list of things I needed to do because I knew I would forget them otherwise. It’s sometimes struggling to read. It’s feeling like the absolute dumbest version of myself some days.
So savor the small, inconsequential, nonsense, day-to-day things you never give a second thought to.
Because one day, they could be taken away.
