Hey everyone. It’s been awhile. I’m back. Kinda. I’m not really used to being this vulnerable, but I’ve been gone for so long and so much happened in my personal life that I feel like I need to explain more than just being vague about life getting hard. This post got longer than expected so I put it under the cut. Just a heads up, there’s a lot to do with physical disability, surgery, illness, depression and the pandemic in this post.
To start, I don’t actually know the words to fully describe it, but mentally I shut down. I could not cope anymore with the stress of the pandemic and trying to protect everyone in my family while also being immune compromised myself. I just collapsed in on myself. I didn’t even realize it was happening till it happened. I kept looking for solutions without really letting myself recognize the problem, because admitting that my depression was getting to the point of overwhelming me, even with medicine and a therapist and friends, was to scary and painful. I didn’t know what to do. Distractions weren’t working. I lost so much time because every day blended into each other and that led to weeks and months blending together, and I shattered. I over promised to people and couldn’t deliver. I signed up for things and had to drop out.
I was drowning without realizing I’d even slipped under the water.
Then my body seemed to catch up with my mental state. I wound up being violently sick for a month. It wasn’t Covid. It was a flu that I truly believe if I’d lived in another time period, would have killed me. I had to be admitted to Urgent Care twice for dehydration, I lost weight rapidly because I couldn’t keep anything down, not even water, and my fever got to 102 at one point. When I finally got to the end of that though, there was one more surprise in store for me. I have arthritis. I’ve had it ever since I was a kid. Often times people just associate it with achy joints but it’s so much more than that. It’s an autoimmune disease that causes the body to attack healthy cells by mistake. That’s what leads to the inflammation and swelling of joints. I’m on something now that helps that by suppressing my immune system, but that also makes me more vulnerable to other things and if you’re sick or have an infection, you’re not supposed to take it. So I didn’t take it during the month I was sick.
Cue my immune system picking up, but because of the arthritis, it went into overdrive and went overboard from after the virus was gone. This wound up causing intense inflammation and pain, specifically in my right knee and elbows. My left arm and right knee especially, I could no longer straighten either out completely, but my leg was the worst. I have never been in the kind of pain I was in during that. It didn’t matter if I was laying or sitting down, if my leg was elevated, level or down, I was just in overwhelming pain. I wound up going to the Emergency Room and being admitted to the hospital for surgery so my knee could be drained.
I’d like to say I came out of it totally fine right away and it was great. But that wasn’t the case. I had to face one of my greatest fears which is helplessness, because I was. I no longer had the ability to get up from a bed or chair easily or walk on my own. For a few days after I got home from the hospital, I had to have someone hold onto me if I needed to walk because even with a walker, I couldn’t do it on my own.
Eventually I was able to use a walker on my own and from there move onto using a cane instead.
It was months of recovery though, not just to rebuild leg strength, but to heal enough from the flu, the arthritis flare up and surgery, to be able to not get exhausted and need to sleep after only a few hours of being awake.
I’m now able to walk again on my own without assistance and my arms and leg have full mobility again. I’m still not at the leg strength I was previously, but that’s going to come with time and building my muscles again.
It felt important to me to make this post. Because I’m not good at admitting, even to myself let alone others, that I’m not okay and that I have limitations. I’m so used to just downplaying how I feel and saying I’m okay, even when I’m really not. I made this post too because I was anxious about making this post and coming back because I feel like I’ve been drowning for so long that even now that I’m out of the water, I’m not sure how to begin rebuilding. But I know I want too and that I need to. I think if I had let myself recognize what I was going through much earlier with my mental state, I wouldn’t have over promised things to people or signed up for things and had to drop out and overall, I wouldn’t have disappointed others if I had actually acknowledged that I wasn’t doing good. I couldn’t have avoided the health issues, but I think even they would have felt less emotionally and mentally traumatic, if I had let myself acknowledge previously that I wasn’t doing good and couldn’t take on anything else, even if I wanted to.
I’m doing that now though. I’m sorry I’ve been gone for so long without a word. I’m sorry if I worried anyone or let anyone down by my absence and lack of communication. I own that. That’s part of the rebuilding process and rebuilding relationships that I let falter because I couldn’t keep up my end.
I’m doing better now, but I’m not sure if I truly feel I can say I’m okay. It’s something I’m having to take day by day and saying ‘I’m okay’ when I wasn’t, is something that came back to bite me. So even though I’m not sure if I’m okay mentally now, I know I am doing better, and one day I will feel confident in saying I’m okay.
Thank you all for reading this. I hope this helps knowing more about what happened and why I just vanished from tumblr the way I did. I’m not sure how active I can be right now, but I’m still here. Thank you all.
