Let’s Get a Few Things Straight Right the Fuck Now

I’m on a roll today… tired of people telling me to not research my health issues. “Quit being a Web MD doctor,” they tell me, with an amused smirk in their eyes, as my obvious ridiculousness has apparently tickled their good senses. I’m such a silly goose, I know. It’s not just that whole thing, but also the frequent vibe I get from people that whatever is going on with me, I am obviously bringing it on myself. I’m tired of much of the attitude I encounter as I work my way through my medical issues, quite frankly.

Please, enlighten me. If you have suffered pain and symptoms that have interfered terribly in your life for YEARS, and you have done lifestyle changes and seen many medical professionals and had operations and taken medications and you were still not well, what would you do? Lay there watching Netflix, figuring some doctor will eventually get it figured out? Somehow I doubt it. You will want answers and you will want hope that it may eventually end. I am not a moron. I am a good researcher. I have learned how to discern types of information into legit or not, learned to observe the when and what of my symptoms, and I have realized that I am the only person privy to my feelings and symptoms. So, yes, I am going to continue to work at it, because at the end of the day, I am the true expert on me.

Furthermore, I am so sick of all the judgement I feel coming at me. My health issues are not my fault. I don’t think I deserve them. They are not a manifestation of a mental illness. Sorry, guys. When I suffered severe PPD and had a years-long mental breakdown, I can say that I did not feel like there was an infected piercing inside my rib cage back then. I was able to eat without it causing me searing pain daily. I used to be able to laugh without having to stop because it hurt. You would think that if my pain was caused by depression, then, logically my pain would have peaked with the depression. But my issues did not come along until I was out of the woods on all that stuff.

And yeah, I do live a first-world lifestyle. I do have an office job and a daily commute. I eat packaged foods and read on my tablet a lot. I drink alcohol moderately and have again started to use fluoride in my toothpaste. I am vaccinated. My lotions have parabens in them. However, none of the people in my life who also live this life have the issues I do. I’m assuming searing abdominal pain is not part of my colleagues day-to-day like it is for me.

But what’s funny is that when this all began, I was going through my “truther” phase – eating the “cleanest” diet of my life, drinking kombucha and eating mostly raw foods, and I had reduced my use of products that were not “natural.” I was in the best shape of my life, with a level of muscle tone I may never again hope to be able to re-achieve. I was meditating and I spent the beginning of this all wondering if it was my chakras being out of balance or something. Maybe my history of sexual abuse as a kid was coming back around to re-victimize yet me another time. Son of a bitch. I meditated on forgiveness and trying to balance out my spiritual vibrations. If I forgave harder, maybe my soul would stop wanting me to hurt physically.

But, I got sicker. I guess I wanted it; I was “asking for it.”

Three summers, this will be, three summers since I was able to have one day without feeling pain in my body. Happy fucking summer solstice, guys. I can barely remember what it was like to not need to take something for pain so I could go out and dance. Middle fingers extended to all of those people who suggested I need to push through it and exercise more and that will help me. Seriously, fuck you guys. The funny part is I loved exercise, and love the high it gives me. But it’s excruciating and takes me days to bounce back from physical exertion. Excuses, excuses, right? I would like to lay a dagger into your side and see how many miles you can run. Email me and we can set up something.

I truly do appreciate all of the suggestions on supplements and THC based remedies. I do not doubt that infusing my body with THC oil would make me feel better, not a bit. But it’s economically not an option, unfortunately, as bullshit as that may be. I am not in a financial or legal position to cook up a pound of weed. We can debate how screwed up that is until we are blue in the face but it remains my position. And I am afraid to mix in more chemistry in my body, in terms of supplements, until I know what is really going on. I don’t want to confuse things more, before I find an answer. I think that makes sense.

“Victim blaming” is a buzzword phrase we hear in society all the time. Generally it relates to rapes – yes she was gang raped at a frat party, but she was drunk and wearing this little dress, so we all mouth these platitudes of how wrong rape is, but goddamn, what self-respecting girl goes and gets hammered in a mini skirt at a frat party without expecting to be raped? She brought it on herself. Not officially, maybe, but this is the truth in most people’s minds when these things are in the news and we all talk about it over coffee in the relative safety of our homes or jobs and all of our careful choices. Not often do we contemplate the how or the why or how a group of young men feel ok about taking turns penetrating an intoxicated woman’s various orfices in a team effort. The seedy underbelly of humanity that no one enjoys examining… the idea that many people will see another human vulnerable, and hurt them instead of help them. So instead it is about how she should have made a better choice, well, then, they would not have been compelled to brutalize her.

I have felt victim blamed many times in my struggle with my health. It gets worse the more fruitless my search for answers becomes. The lack of a definitive diagnosis so far seems to justify the thinking that this is on me, that, by living my life in a way that is basically the same as most other people, it is somehow irrational for me to expect to feel about as well as most others. This must be something that has sprung from my poor choices, physically, mentally, energetically, spiritually. The implication of this is the idea that, when people do not live life in the right way, they will experience pain, unhappiness, and illness. To an extent, of course, this IS true. If you live hard and rough, don’t eat right, etc., yeah, you are going to suffer consequences physically. But what about all of the people who live within reasonable bounds and still get sick?

To me, I see the mentality of victim blaming to be the result of fear and good intentions, in a way. People want to believe they are safe, and so are their loved ones. The people who are sick are sick because they made the wrong choices, they did the wrong things, and now they are paying a fair penalty for it. It’s sad but it’s fair, and makes sense.

How many of us see the morbidly obese man or woman on the scooter at Walmart and shake our heads in disgust? I think we all have. You tell yourself, “Get up and walk, for fuck’s sake. No wonder you are fat and can’t walk around. You are lazy and disgusting trash. Now get the fuck out of my way. I need to find the mayo.” None of us know this person’s story or medical history, generally, and the one we patch together in our minds is a mosaic of assumptions. This is socially acceptable victim blaming. The purpose of this is to safely place ourselves and loved ones on the other side of that dividing line – If I make better choices, I will not be the one in the scooter at Walmart. And it is largely a logical point. Take care of yourself and odds are you will be healthier. But what if it doesn’t work that way, and one day, after making what you thought were mostly the right choices, you find yourself sick and in pain? And then you are the one in the scooter, enduring the haughty glances?

Welcome to my neighborhood.

It stands to reason that we must always try our best. We should definitely use the knowledge we have acquired about the human body and health and safety to maximize our lives the in the best way we can, as much as we are able to. But we must never assume that by doing these things that we are able to effectively circumvent any negative outcomes. This is simply not true. And when we come across people who are in the midst of these personal horrors, no matter how tempted we are to blame as a means of separating ourselves from the same fate, we must stop ourselves. Being alive is being vulnerable. We all have a death sentence and we all are eventually going to face some trouble or another. I am so sorry to tell you this, but even if you eat “clean,” live “clean,” meditate, spend time in nature, pierce the veil or what-not, you can still get sick. You can still acquire health conditions and pain and maybe even die from it. Sometimes a cell just goes rogue. Sometimes a blood clot explodes your brain, out of nowhere. No matter how healthy you may live, sorry, but you are dying.

This is my battle cry. Sorry, not sorry.

All of the disapproval, David Avocado Wolfe links, and judgement in the world cannot save you from this fate. Sooner or later, you are dead meat, as am I. So, forgive me if I seem flip and dismissive sometimes. I spent a lot of time trying to lead that clean and pure life and I still got sick. And now, in between shitty days and doctors and sometimes feeling sad for all I have lost, I try to enjoy myself as much as I can. It sometimes comes in the form of fruity smelling, chemically based lotions from Bath & Body Works, or a nice gluten-filled IPA beer, or, sometimes, a Big Mac (GASP). I truly have no idea why my hair is falling out and has been for the past several months and why I feel like I have an infected wound in my torso, or why almost everything I eat makes me want to vomit. I have to summon the hope in myself that maybe this will someday improve and keep reading, keeping feeling and thinking, keep trying to get to the bottom of it.

I don’t need people talking to me like I have no health literacy, have no self-awareness, or like I have no grasp on how to live a healthy life. I don’t need medical or nutritional or spiritual advice from my friends and family, unless I ask specifically for it. Sorry but I wish you all would trust me that I am smart and open-minded and I am working on it in my way. Don’t make me explain this all to you as a means of ending a hurtful conversation. Please don’t hate me or yell at me for telling you I need this. I need love and empathy and I need understanding. Don’t blame me because you are afraid of my fate becoming yours. Blaming me will not keep you safe. Sick people seem to be a walking manifestation of the vulnerabilities that come from having a human form but it doesn’t make it right to victim blame us. Life is scary. We can do better by being empathetic and kind to one another instead of judging and preaching. Yeah, maybe it is scary and it is tempting to believe that you hold the answers to how to make it end, but odds are, you don’t. Stop bitching at me, and give me a fucking hug. We are all in this fight for our lives together, aren’t we? Bring it in, my friend.