The Thing They Forget to Tell You

Something they forget to tell you in Serious Illness School is that it isn't all appointments and pharmacy trips and giving yourself needles at home when you'd rather be drinking tea. 

Sometimes it is doing really scary shit, and listening to hard metal at ten o'clock at night with both headphones in and the volume up as loud as it can go, trying to blow the memories out of your brain. Sometimes it's being surrounded by paperwork, pens, and voicemails, and being totally, utterly alone. Sometimes it's family and friends who absolutely cannot understand what you are going through because they weren't in that bed, they weren't on that floor, they didn't feel what you did and know what you knew and experienced what you experienced or saw what you saw. 

Sometimes it's going to every single appointment on your own, because someone else has to work. Sometimes it's making phone calls on your own. Sometimes it's dealing with someone else's ego, or someone else's limitations, or someone else's issues, when you are trying desperately to navigate a system and a serious medical issue of your own. 

Sometimes it's coming to terms with your own limitations, your own ego, your own issues, your own self that impedes the process. 

Sometimes it is just never easy.

Some things in life exist and tell us how strong we really are. Some things in life exist and tell us exactly how much it takes to break us into tiny little weeping pieces on the floor. Some things in life wear away everything we are and reduce us to a core of unbreakable stone, gradually worn away by the constant rain.