#polyamory saves lives. but if you have autonomy over your medical care and how you spend your time right now...

[crimeronan]

shoutout to this post i made almost three years ago. i wish i could go back in time and tell my slightly-younger self what a Time we were about to have. scrolling through the early days of my autoimmune tag is wild because past me is oversharing about my diagnoses and the fact that i might be dying and the fact that i keep finding eulogies instead of support groups when i look for community online, but i am...... not sick yet.

like. i definitely Think i'm sick, at the time. i am definitely tired and fevered and feel like shit, i'm using organ transplant reject drugs and having biopsies done and doctor's faces keep going gray when they see my skin and pharmacists keep giving me Terrible Pitying Looks when i fill my new scripts,

but i am not sick yet.

we have not yet explored the true event horizon of what it means to be sick. i am sick like most chronically fatigued spoonies online but.... i am going to learn a Lot more about how sick a body can really get.

anyway. i wish i could tell my slightly-younger self that we're about to lose the Entirety of our mid-twenties to illness. and we'll come out the other side blinking and confused and stumbling like a newborn lamb, feeling like we just went through a dark subway tunnel that folded us from one shore to the other, there's a void in the middle that's only accessible through the posts somebody made for all those years. someone made those posts with our hands. we sure don't remember them, though!

we won't feel any different than we did at 24 not just because we were inside for years due to a pandemic, but also because our brain was shutting down. we'll also feel like an entirely separate person from the 24-year-old self who didn't know yet what being sick was.

wish i could tell my slightly-younger self that now, as of writing this, when we're nearly 28, we'll be on the highest possible therapeutic dose of hydroxychloroquine, and that as long as we escape any rare medical complications from that, we'll be taking it for the rest of our life. wish i could tell them we're about to sacrifice three full years for the chance to live a whole, self-actualized life at the other end of hell.

wish i could tell her things are going to get way way way worse and then they're going to get a lot better. knocking on wood about it of course because there's always the chance of climate catastrophe or natural disasters or new illnesses or other calamities interfering with life plans. but if i don't jinx myself, i could tell her we've got the rest of 28 and 29 and then our 30s and 40s and beyond to be awake and happy and alive. we are still Young. losing a handful of years and having strange new lines around our eyes doesn't change that.

dunno what else to say here. i found this post a few weeks back in the "related posts" suggestions when looking at my own blog and it made me laugh aloud bc i was like. oh honey. ohhh honey. you don't even Know yet. you are going to be so different in three years and you're also going to be exactly the same.

i guess the conclusion here is that i can't tell my three-years-ago self what's coming but i can tell the chronically ill ppl following me: please for the love of GOD pursue diagnosis and treatment for your weird physical bullshit. sorry i know it sucks and hurts and is bad i know. doctors and the healthcare system are a nightmare to navigate, especially now w/ the medical sector collapsing in the wake of post-COVID problems, but you never know when your baseline of "i feel sick" is going to deteriorate Beyond Reckoning.

be kind to your future self. be kind to your past self. i don't want anybody else to learn what this kind of sickness feels like if they can avoid it.

anyone else ever have that chronic illness feel of like. yes i know people can get sick at any time and there are plenty of diseases you’re more likely to get if you’re UNDER 40 and many many many of the people in my social circle have chronic illnesses while being around my age but also. bro i am 24 come on