"Pain is the ultimate depressant"
and that with so much pain to bear, and being in such a state of depression, it's hard to stay positive. She later gives great advice about ways to cope with the physical pain of chronic illness, such as using essential oils and a huge heating pad. I need me a king size heating pad!
But that sentence of hers--pain being the ultimate depressant--just kept coming back to me.
When I graduated early from high school, most of my friends would tell our peers where I was...in bed. I'll be the first to tell you--there are really no "pros" to being basically bedbound.
My friends would come back to me with other students' comments, such as, "Oh man--what a lucky dog," or something like, "What I wouldn't give to be in her shoes!" What they didn't know was that at that particular time, I could barely walk. (So I definitely wasn't wearing shoes.) I was sleeping most of the day because my energy level was about the same as a koala's, but instead of getting my nutrition from eucalyptus leaves, my diet consisted of the easiest thing to make: cheese crackers.
I would cry at nothing, or at everything. I couldn't be all melodramatic and lock myself in my room for hours, pouting away, because I could barely make it to my door. (At this point, I really needed my mother to lean on when I had to merely walk to the bathroom.)
The point is, I felt pain from all different aspects. And I still do.
I have felt depression for a long time because of the pain, and college did help with my depression for a while. However, in my junior year, all the stress and anxiety just threw up all over me. While I would try to clean it up, I would just have a bigger mess on my hands until I was surrounded in this sticky mess that I could barely make my way through.
It was like being in the muddy trenches at war. But I was in no man's land. I was fair game for either side--would depression take me down or would all the anxiety? Or maybe an IED would just hit me out from out of nowhere, an allusion to the pain?
When it all became too much, my body barely hanging on in-between enervating seizures nearly every day and throbbing migraines that left me a hermit most of the time, I decided to medically withdrawal from college merely a semester before graduating.
It was the hardest decision I've ever had to make.
Sitting in bed, now, typing this, I'm in horrible pain that's radiating through my body. Recently I've been depressed for a while now, having to up my medication because of it.
And even though it's hard to think of the positive through all the fog, and while it's hard to believe the saying, "everything happens for a reason," I do recognize a small glimmer of hope: I have been writing more lately. And if I ever get a book out about Lyme disease, I pray that it helps just one person from experiencing everything I've been through.
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