![]() ![]() House would arrive and fix what was wrong with me, then my life would go back to how it was. It’s a constant assessment that often involves uncomfortable discussions with friends and colleagues because the invisible nature of my disabilities means having to self-disclose how I’m feeling to get the accommodations I need.īefore I had a name for what was going on in my body, I imagined that Dr. Others, it’s rescheduling plans because I just don’t have the energy. Some days, that means sitting on a heating pad while I work from home. Each morning, I wake up and take stock of how I feel and what adjustments I’ll have to make as I move through the world outside my bedroom. In 2021, I contracted COVID-19 and developed long COVID, another invisible illness that has compounded my original symptoms and added a few new ones to the mix.Īll of this means I’ve had to tune into what my body needs more consistently than most people. Because it’s a diagnosis by exclusion, meaning there are no tests to confirm it, I saw two handfuls of doctors in multiple disciplines to figure out what was causing my symptoms by ruling out just about everything else. My symptoms first appeared when I was in college, but it took seven years for me to get diagnosed with fibromyalgia. This Year of Making Noise story is also part of Prevention’s We Are Not Invisible project, a series of personal and informative stories that shed light on those with Invisible Disabilities. And there are likely far more of us than that. But I’m one of millions of Americans living with an invisible disability, about 10 percent of the population, according to one Disabled World estimate. ![]() ![]() To look at me, I’m just another 35-year-old white woman, about as put together as the next person. Every time I stand, my vision kaleidoscopes to black and back again. As I write this, bolts of electric pain shimmer down my right leg and up toward my shoulder as my joints throb in time with my heart. ![]()
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