Sick for Life: Pt. 1

Sick for life, or at least that’s how it has felt looking back of all the years- trips to the hospital, Emergency room visits, doctors’ office visits, specialist. I feel it’s important to lay a timeline of all I’ve experienced. Maybe, just maybe, my timeline lines up with someone out there and I can speed things up for them. Point them in a direction of healing  I’ve only recently discovered for myself.

Now in my early 30's, it's hard to believe I've been dealing with chronic illness over a decade... I say only a decade because my childhood was what one might consider “normal”.Growing up my parents might have described me as "easily sick". It never failed, if someone in our household came down with something, I was guaranteed to get it ten-folds.

Chickenpox feels like a prime example of just how unstable my immune system was compared to my younger sibling. If you’re a millennial you’ll know exactly what Im talking about when I use the phrase, “chickenpox party”. Seriously, it was a thing back in the day- or at least it was here in the Midwest.

It was almost like all the mom’s had one another on speed dial and just as soon as someone came down with the coveted chickenpox all the moms would be dialing in their friends to bring the kids over for a play date- aka a chickenpox party. I remember growing up being led to believe that it was best if I caught the chickenpox at a young age rather than in adulthood… not that my six-year-old self could even comprehend the importance of this herd immunity all the midwestern mama’s were trying to create.

With a little background on a chickenpox party, you can probably imagine how the next scene unfolds. Alyssa Marie from down the street got chickenpox and me and my younger sibling were invited to come over for a playdate, consequently also catching the chickenpox. Now for my sister, the chickenpox were no big deals. She had the tale-tale signs of the virus with itchy red spots appearing from head to toe, but other than the obvious she was perfectly fine. Her normal self for the most part. Me on the other hand… absolutely covered from head to toe- hardly an inch of skin left unscathed. But it wasn’t just the spots for me, it was the high fever, headache, and debilitating fatigue that kept me itching and bedridden for a week.

Fast forward through childhood to adolescence, I remained easily compromised by illness. My freshman year of high school I caught Epstein Barr Virus (EBV) or more commonly known as Mono, “the kissing disease”. Debilitating fatigue was my first symptom, a sore throat straight out of hell, and lower abdominal pain- which we later learned to be unrelated. It was in fact the low abdominal pain that sent my Mom over the edge enough to finally feel I warranted a visit to our local emergency room. While in the examination room I was ran through a series of testing. Ultrasounds, CAT Scan, and numerous bloodwork later I was diagnosed with a sizeable ovarian cyst and while reviewing the CAT scan noticed my spleen to be extremely enlarged which prompted further bloodwork. Hours later I was diagnosed with EBV, put on an antibiotic for my strep throat, birth control for my ovarian cyst, and sent on my way to recoup in bed. To this day I don’t know if it was the timing of it all, the birth control, or the antibiotic that sent my system into a downhill spiral... I quickly became unable to attend school due to the fatigue, crippling anxiety, and liver enzymes that were less than favorable.

Talk about a dark time! Stepping out into high school from middle school was a seemingly HUGE milestones in my adolescent life and here I was stuck at home, quarantined to my bedroom, and masked up anytime I was around my other family members. Moving past, notably, the hardest four months of my adolescence, I returned to school. Never feeling like I fully recovered from the EBV, the fatigue and brain fog would continue to follow me throughout the remainder of my high school career… throughout life truthfully.