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Blogs about illness, medical troubles, or disability have been central to my life in the last few years and have helped me more than I can say. It's Invisible Illness Week for people with non-obvious disabilities or chronic illness. So, this week I'd like to highlight a few bloggers, including people in caretaking or support roles, who share their thoughts on chronic illness, cancer, or disability along with all the other things they write about! It's especially good to look around and think how medical difficulties don't make you suddenly a one-trick pony. These bloggers write about everything. Their lives and the beauty of their relationships shine out through their stories. Even when they're cranky!
Aimee's mom is battling cancer. And Aimee's battling it with her, caretaking, being her mom's support through all the visits and bills , pain, exhaustion, and difficulties.
From diagnosis through treatment and recovery, fighting cancer is harder than anything I’ve ever known. It’s not any one thing, it’s everything. Every blood test, rude staff member, doctor’s visit, and new medication just adds to the strain. It takes a toll on your body which forgets how to sleep or eat normally. It wears out your heart, which feels like it’s shattering into thousands of pieces, and just when you think you’ve collected all the shards to put it back together, it breaks again.
How hard it is to have people ask how you're doing - routine, friendly greeting - and not to be able to say, "Fine". In Aimee's case the answer might be more like, "Enduring." Her strength and her love for her mom really come through, as she explains exactly what it's so hard to tell people when they ask how it's going.
Wife of a Wounded Marine is written by another person whose life is affected by medical troubles you can't see when you look at her. I like how she sees her life, not denying the difficulty or her own fallibility but facing life head on and looking to the future.
After many hospitals, leg salvage, amputation, miscarriage, overdose, trips, celebrities, love, and borderline hate, we've made it and are finally entering into the next phase of our lives. I am not perfect and sometimes stress gets the best of me but I am human (and a young one at that) that is going through very serious things. I'm just doing the best that I can to juggle being my husbands backbone and still have time for myself. I write this blog to vent, to get away, and to share my story.
What a blog. Karie has a gift for telling it like it is. In her sidebar you can trace the story of her and her husband's last year, through the moment when she learns he was wounded, to photos of the daily care of his leg wounds, their battle to save his leg, dealing with the Veterans' Administration, and on through amputation and a long, long rehab. She sees and can't look away from the terrible trauma of having been a soldier in war. Physically, emotionally, and the way their buddies are also dealing with trauma.
The crazy part is more often then not terrible things like this act as a domino effect on these guys. The grief of their friend dieing in turn causes them to go have a drink or take that extra pill to get away from it. These guys are broken in a lot of ways and just don't know how to deal with this stuff anymore. They can't bear any more pain.
The ripples of our loved ones' battles spread through all our lives. Like Karie all we can do is hang in there and be supportive. Being there, witnessing pain and difficulty, and providing companionship is amazingly important.
I always enjoy MLO's book blogging and comics blogging! Lately she has also blogged a lot about ovarian cancer and what it's like to go through chemo. I thought her post on being on the wrong floor of the hospital was a good bit of patient advocacy; because she had to be in the wrong ward, she ended up with nurses who didn't understand proper pain management for people with cancer. In MLO's case, her husband stepped in and watched
