Mother. Athlete. Radiation Therapist. Lover of movement and freedom. These are words to describe the “old me”.<\/p>\n
January 12, 2002 was the day I woke up in my new undesired body with my new unrecognizable thought processes. My brain could no longer multiply three-digit numbers. My body could no longer run and jump and play. I lost my job. I lost friends and family who thought I should just “get out, get some sunshine, exercise, and feel better.” I got depressed and cried a lot which is something I’d never done in my life.<\/p>\n
Loving life and enjoying every second was my motto. No more. Now, it was a struggle to wash my own hair, do the dishes, and step up a single step into my home. I lost my job and got denied Social Security Disability because “she is able to run an errand”. There was no explanation and no one knew what I had. I got a fairly quick diagnosis, but that still didn’t explain to me how I was supposed to live this life in this new uninhabitable body.<\/p>\n
There was no one to tell me that I would crash, have remissions, crash, and have remissions over and over again. I’ve had this wretched, life-altering disease for over fifteen years now. Last year, I had a crash so bad that I felt like I could possibly die from this disease. My body was so weak and I was so scared. Just lying on the couch, my heart was pounding from doing nothing. It was pounding just because I was alive and that was too much effort for my body.<\/p>\n
For the first time in 14 years, I lost hope. I told my boyfriend, the love of my life, the one who knew me for two years before I got CFS, “I feel hopeless. I’m scared to death. I don’t know what to do to help myself and there’s no one who can help me.”
\nIt’s taken me a year to come out of this and to get to a point where I can do my own grocery shopping. It’s taken acupuncture and meditation (lots and lots of meditation!!), deep breathing, and pacing to get me back to the land of the “living”.<\/p>\n
I never want to go back to that place again, but I don’t know what I can do to make that not happen. It scares me because there’s no one to help me.<\/p>\n
There’s no cure because there’s no cause. Find a cause and find a cure. Help me to stay alive to see my kids grow old. Don’t let me die early and leave them without a mother because you didn’t care enough to fund research.<\/p>\n
My story is that I love living. I love moving and laughing and wrestling with my kids. I love to feel alive. I don’t think that’s too much to ask.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Humans of ME\/CFS Mother. Athlete. Radiation Therapist. Lover of movement and freedom. These are words to describe the “old me”. January 12, 2002 was the day I woke up in my new undesired body with my new unrecognizable thought processes. My brain could no longer multiply three-digit numbers. My body could no longer run and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":748,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/humansofchronicillness.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/07\/lisa_v.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/humansofchronicillness.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/754"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/humansofchronicillness.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/humansofchronicillness.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/humansofchronicillness.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/humansofchronicillness.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=754"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/humansofchronicillness.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/754\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/humansofchronicillness.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/748"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/humansofchronicillness.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=754"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/humansofchronicillness.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=754"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/humansofchronicillness.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=754"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}