RABlog Week - Mental Health
It’s time for the 3rd Annual RABlog Week! Today’s topic is Mental Health.
This was the prompt -
How do you manage to maintain your mental health while dealing with autoimmune disease? Discuss how dealing with RA every day makes you emotional. Do you hide your emotions?
How do I manage to maintain my mental health? Some days, I’m not sure I do. It’s a day-by-day, minute-by-minute kind of thing. I am privileged in that I have the right tools to deal with everything. My husband is fantastic, I have great friends and best of all, I have health coverage that covers 100% of the cost of my medication.
But then, there are days when a family member will ask me to crochet something and I try to (tactfully) explain that I can’t because my shoulder and wrist are sore and I can tell they don’t *quite* understand the severity of it. And they certainly don’t seem to understand how much it bothers me that I am physically unable to crochet right now so them asking more than once for something wears on me mentally.
I need to be more assertive about that but I don’t like to complain or to be seen as complaining. But if my shoulder hurts so bad that pain is radiating down my arm to my elbow, well, I should probably say something. Right?
Right.
I’m trying. It’s a work in progress.
