Recovery from Chronic Illness

            The term I have recovered from chronic illness just baffles me. If someone truly has a chronic illness, they don’t recover from it because if it is chronic that means you will always have it. The idea that someone could actually recover leads people to have misconceptions about what a chronic illness is and that it could be cured. Chronic illnesses are not curable, plain and simple. This idea goes on to ignore that each person with a specific chronic illness will vary in their symptoms and their own experiences with that disease. The idea of a cure plays also into people’s insecurities about having been newly diagnosed with that disease. When people are first diagnosed, they need the real, truthful answers about what they are experiencing and what they can expect going forward in dealing with that disease. 

            Saying that one has recovered from a chronic disease makes others feel less than or inadequate if they themselves haven’t recovered. It makes a person feel that they aren’t doing enough, living the right kind of lifestyle, or following the right people to find a solution to recovery themselves. This idea sets a dangerous president that people will fall into and go out of their way to find a recovery method for themselves. Instead of trying to manage their symptoms which is what you have to do with a chronic illness, they will waste their time trying to find a cure. They won’t focus on their symptoms, that will continue to get worse as they search out a cure that they feel was promised to them by others who stated they had cured themselves. 

            This idea of a cure makes others think that a person will return back to their “old selves” before they got sick. This is such a bad idea to foster because once you have a chronic illness you will never, ever return to your former self no matter how hard you try and want to achieve that. You are simply going to be different; you are brand new form of yourself and you will need to come to terms with that no matter how hard that is going to be to accept. These people that taut a recovery will ultimately lead others to think that there must be a cure to all chronic illnesses. This is going to lead to a lack of empathy from people who aren’t dealing with chronic illnesses and support for a person is going to wane because people are going to feel like that person isn’t doing all that is necessary to achieve that miracle cure, they heard about. 

I had this person in my life who knew someone who had one of my chronic illnesses (supposedly) and they were able to “cure” theirs by eating an all-paleo diet. I got so mad that that person and I told them that the person they knew didn’t have my disease because there was no cure and eating a lot of meat was actually truly harmful to our bodies in that scenario. They argued with me and told me that I didn’t want to get better and I was just using it as an excuse to not work. I won’t get into all I did for them while I wasn’t working that they loved and oh so appreciated at the time. I honestly have no idea where they were coming from in that moment but all I know is that I saw red because there is no cure for my disease and I knew this. 

            After that I started feeling like a failure for a moment in time because what if this diet would make me feel better, what if this person was onto something. So, it sent it me right back into researching and questioning everything I had already learned. That is what touting a recovery does to those of use dealing with chronic illnesses. So, a long time of research lead me right back to the same conclusions and realizations I had at the very start of my diagnosis, there was no cure in fact there is hardly enough research done on the disease to even start to find a cure if there was to be one. 

So, after all the pain of realizing there is no cure, people are left feeling let down once again. They were let down to learn they had this chronic disease and now they are let down because there is no real cure no matter what is being touted. This idea of a cure lends itself to people not being able to celebrate their victories over their disease when they manage their symptoms. Symptom management is to be rewarded each and every day when you are dealing with chronic illness. Saying there is a cure to chronic diseases is a faulty and dangerous idea that somehow is still out there floating around and causing havoc on people who are just finding out they are going to be dealing this chronic illness for the rest of their lives. It is such a dangerous idea to be presented. So, if you see there is a cure for whatever disease you are experiencing or your friend is experiencing, please know it is false and remember the celebrate the symptom management each and every day!