Chronic illness is an insidious beast. It creeps in slowly. Then it dictates more and more of your life. It steals your happy moments, and causes excruciating pain, intense fatigue, and relentless nausea. Before you notice your life has been absorbed by the chronic illness monster. So how do you live Chronically Alive?
- Take everything one moment at a time
- Appreciate the positive moments by paying extra special attention to them and the way they feel
- Set yourself small doable goals every day
- Think of things that you are grateful for every day
- Every morning make a list of three fun activities to do that day that you know you always enjoy, while performing those activities notice every part of them that feels good and linger your focus their
- Come up with lists before you go to the doctors, make sure to go through each item on the list at your doctors’ appointment
- Don’t be afraid to ask your nurses lots of questions
Living Chronically Alive
Living chronically alive is the only way to survive chronic illness for any length of time. Otherways you will be too overwhelmed. If you’re not living chronically alive you are going to give up before your time is actually up. it might seem like things are hopeless, but there is always another perspective to the situation. Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it. Take the words “give up” right out of your vocabulary.
So What is the Chronically Alive Blog About
This blog starts off with my journey as an eight year old having difficulty standing through the whole Jewish prayer service every morning at my Jewish day school, and quickly moves to my trouble holding my lunch down at school. Then flash forward two years it discusses World War III over eating at my house when I was ten after my pediatrician decided that my inability to eat was an eating disorder not a medical issue, but I knew there was something physically wrong with me, stopping me from holding down food.
It progresses through my first hospitalization and then my first feeding tube and as I get older it discusses my repeat hospitalizations, my dad’s denial of my illness, my development of a brain tumor, surgery to remove the brain tumor, a brain bleed three weeks later with a life flight down to Massachusetts General Hospital at 3 AM for emergency surgery. Eventually, I ended up at an assisted living called Side by Side where i had an unexpected romance between myself, a 24-year-old girl, and Jeff, a 40-year-old man barely hanging on the transplant list in a race against time to get a new liver before he is kicked off the transplant list forever for getting cancer a second time.
How to Read Chronically Alive Blog
The posts are all listed on the right side of the page. The first posts are listed on top. Each post listed is a category, when you click on it, it will open up into four or five different posts. The post on top comes first, then the one underneath it, then the one underneath that one etc.
I do plan on posting more posts soon. If you read a post that you enjoy, please comment on it, so I know what I am doing right. I respond to all comments.
Happy Reading everyone!
