Are you done being sick yet?

I hope you feel better soon! A phrase where people mean well. However to those of us in the chronic illness community that phrase has a different meaning. How most of us want to respond is thanks I probably won't! I think some people in life forget what the word chronic means. Normies get tired of us constantly being sick or having to take off time to rest or for doctor's appointments or just trying to keep up in a world where you have to function on a normie's level all the while being a person with a chronic illness where it is a struggle some days just to get through the day. If they are tired of hearing about it we are tired of living it. But unlike them we don't get to crawl into our hole of normal and just go on with life.  Being someone who has a chronic illness but who also works in healthcare it's almost like riding both sides of the fence. And believe me there are internal conflicts between the patient in me and working in healthcare. 

You see things from a different angle when you both have to live in that world and work in that world. I think it's a double-edged sword for us. We want to make a difference and pay it forward to an entity that once helped us. But at the same time you see the flaws in the system more.  For me having one foot in both worlds is exciting but exhausting at the same time. It's all I've ever known.  However at some point you grow tired of having one foot in both worlds and you just want to live in one or the other. 

Normies don't get it. They never will. It's a club if they are lucky they will never get to join. Their version of being tired and Ours are two totally different things. They can never understand the trauma of living a life full of doctors and medication and tests for your entire life. Of being gas lit and going from Doctor to doctor just trying to get a straight answer on why you are sick. But you don't get answers you just get more pills and try to lose weight. 

So now try being someone in the chronic illness Club and working for the entity that is supposed to help those who are sick. I think to be in the chronic illness Club you have to be a little twisted. Because of the life you have lived you see everything. You see people going home beating the thing that was supposed to kill them, people still struggling to get answers and people who lost their battle with the thing that was trying to kill them. But the thing you become is a voice for the people you identify with. The reason you are there. Your fellow members of the chronic illness Club.  When you have a foot in both worlds it's almost like a love hate relationship. You love working with others like you, however the sheer bureaucracy and frustration of dealing with entities that see patients as no more than dollar signs will be enough to drive you mad. Do you chase your dreams and leave behind the only world you've ever known?  The world that makes sense to you but at the same time makes no sense at all. So you search for meaning. In work, in life, on living with this broken body your cant escape. Just a spoonie girl living in a normie world. No one said it would be easy. 

You find yourself dreaming about a life without one or the other. What life would be like if you weren't sick or what life would be like if you were physically able to choose a different profession. Like that thing you always had a passion for. That thing that everyone says if you do the thing you love you don't work a day in your life. That thing the thing that sets your soul on fire. You find yourself envying the normies the ones who don't really have a clue what it's like to live in a broken body.  Its not that we hate them. What we feel is envy for something we will never have again, sadness for the life we never got to experience and a little bit of anger to the normies that waste their life killing themselves with their Vice of choice. And we feel like they should be grateful that they aren't a member of the chronic illness Club.