#chronicallyillandfabulous

[chronically-ill-and-fabulous]

Pain: because apparently feeling bad in one place wasn’t enough. 🙃

0/10 experience. Would not repeat. Unfortunately, it’s a subscription service.

[squilliamnylander]

Have you seen the leafs video with Carlton scaring everyone? (It’s on their FB page) Austin screaming like a girl has made my day

YEAH AND I WANT HIS SCREAM AS MY FUCKING RING TONE

[chronically-ill-and-fabulous]

Sorry I've been a bit quiet recently... 👀

I've been working on something that's really close to my heart, so social media has taken a bit of a back seat.

But don't worry... I'm still following today's plan. 😂💙

Wake up. ✔️ Survive. ✔️ Back to bed... pending. 😴

Hope everyone's had a gentle day!

[chronically-ill-and-fabulous]

Chronic illness logic:

Can remember every appointment I’ve had since 2018.

Can’t remember why I walked into the kitchen.

Makes perfect sense. 🤷‍♀️💙

[chronically-ill-and-fabulous]

💙 The Mental Journey – Part 2 💙

Grieving the Person I Used to Be

One of the biggest things I learned in the coping with pain group came from my counsellor.

She explained that a lot of people living with chronic pain don’t realise they’re grieving.

Not grieving a person.

Grieving the person they used to be.

That hit me hard.

For years I had been fighting my body, fighting the pain and fighting the reality of my situation, but I’d never stopped to think about what I had lost along the way.

My confidence.

My independence.

The version of me that could make plans without worrying about the consequences.

The version of me that didn’t have to think about pain every single day.

When she explained it, everything suddenly made sense.

So I took the time to grieve.

To grieve my past self.

To say goodbye to the person I used to be.

Not because I wanted to give up, but because I needed to stop comparing myself to someone I couldn’t be anymore.

Only then could I start again.

Only then could I begin to accept the new version of me and take each day as it comes.

I still have difficult days.

I still miss the person I used to be sometimes.

But now, instead of constantly looking backwards, I’m learning to move forwards.

And that has made all the difference. 💙

Part 3: Learning that asking for help doesn’t make me weak.

[chronically-ill-and-fabulous]

Sunday is here and I’ve survived another week. 💙

Not every week is about smashing goals, being productive or ticking everything off the list.

Sometimes the win is simply making it through.

If you’re reading this, you’ve survived 100% of your bad days so far.

Be proud of that.

Now excuse me while I spend Sunday recovering from the week before Monday arrives. 😂☕

[chronically-ill-and-fabulous]

💙 The Mental Journey – Part 1 💙

One of the hardest things chronic pain gave me wasn’t pain.

It was guilt.

Guilt for cancelling plans.

Guilt for needing help.

Guilt for saying no.

Guilt for being tired.

Guilt for not being able to do the things I felt I should be able to do.

As the years went on, I carried that guilt everywhere.

I felt guilty when I couldn’t keep up.

I felt guilty when I needed to rest.

I felt guilty when people had to do things for me.

I even felt guilty for talking about my pain because I worried people were fed up of hearing about it.

For a long time, I thought guilt was just part of living with chronic pain.

Then I started attending the coping with pain group.

Listening to other people talk about their experiences made me realise something.

Every single one of us was being harder on ourselves than we would ever be on anyone else.

We all had different struggles.

Different limitations.

Different things we saw as our flaws.

But we all seemed to be carrying the same guilt.

That’s when I started to realise that guilt doesn’t have to be part of my life.

I’m still learning.

I still catch myself feeling guilty sometimes.

But I’m so much further forward than I was.

Thanks to a group of amazing women, I’ve learned so much about myself.

We’ve supported each other, learned together and grown together.

And for that, I’ll always be grateful. 💙

Part 2: Grieving the person I used to be.

[chronically-ill-and-fabulous]

Part 8 – What If This Doesn’t Work Either?

I started the back rehabilitation programme hoping it might finally be the thing that helped.

By this point I’d been through years of appointments, physiotherapy, medication changes and being passed from one service to another. I wasn’t expecting miracles, but I was hoping for something.

The programme itself wasn’t bad.

The people running it were nice, and for the first time I was in a room full of people who understood what it was like to live with pain every day. We all had different stories, but we shared the same frustrations.

In some ways, that was comforting.

What was harder was watching other people improve while I felt stuck.

I did the exercises.

I turned up.

I gave it a chance.

But instead of helping, I often felt worse for days afterwards. I wasn’t seeing the benefits other people seemed to be getting, and that started to play on my mind.

One session in particular sticks with me. My pain became so overwhelming during the class that I ended up having a panic attack in the middle of it. Looking back, I don’t think it was just the pain. It was the frustration, the fear, the exhaustion and the constant worry that nothing was ever going to help.

If physiotherapy hadn’t helped…

If pain management hadn’t fixed it…

And now rehabilitation wasn’t helping either…

Then what was?

I started questioning everything.

Maybe this was just my life now.

Maybe this was as good as it was going to get.

It wasn’t just the physical pain that was exhausting me anymore. It was the constant cycle of getting my hopes up and then feeling disappointed when something didn’t work.

The one positive was the people.

For the first time, I didn’t feel completely alone in what I was going through.

But physically, I was no further forward.

And that left me asking one question I couldn’t get out of my head:

What happens when you’ve done everything you’ve been told to do, and you’re still in pain?

Coming next: This wasn’t the end of my pain journey. But it was the beginning of something just as important – my mental journey.