Yesterday I had a no good, very bad day.
When you have a chronic illness, you get used to a sort of baseline of pain. It’s like you figure out what your “normal” state is. This normal state is your typical level of swelling and fatigue; your typical level of joint pain and stiffness, of general body pain; your typical level of inability. People without chronic illness may not understand this, or may only think they do, but those of us who have some wonderful disease, know what this means.
Yesterday wasn’t normal. I think yesterday may have actually been my first really bad day since I began the many medications I am taking. Oh, I have had some bad days, some slightly worse than normal days. But I had not had a very bad day yet.
I would like to never have another, honestly.
If I list today all the things that made yesterday suck, I don’t think it would effectively capture it, mostly because it wasn’t just the things that happened, it was the accumulation of those things that were too much. I could barely move; I was exhausted; my swelling was much worse than normal; my mystery abdominal pain returned; my pain was so bad I was nauseous. Add in: everyone in the house was upset or tense, doubling my tension; I burnt myself and cut myself while helping cook dinner; I had a total sobbing breakdown at one point because it was all too much. It really was all too much.
Is this what I have to look forward to: normal bad days broken up by the really horrible ones? I really hope not.
I can hearing this piece of a song in a head. I think it’s from (of all things) the old Rudolph cartoon, tho it may be another of those badly animated Christmas specials. The characters are singing “You put one foot in front of the other.” And that’s what I have to do, even if those feet are slow and swollen. Put one in front of the other and hope for the best. After all, they can’t all be very bad day days.
The New Normal 