Invisible Illness

After a long hiatus (I've been a bit under the weather lately), I will soon be posting a 2 part "series" on Invisible Illness. In it, I'll be talking about what to say and not to say to chronically ill people, why we often look and act better around others and then crash when at home, and a little about what "invisible illness" entails.

Believe it or not, I’ve always been a really private person, so it is hard to share my personal struggles with the whole world through this blog. As I have mentioned before, I have decided to do this because I want others to be helped by my struggle with illness. By reading the posts, you might get the idea that I’m not all that sick b/c I am able to write the entries each week. Well…what you don’t get to see is the fact that it takes me at least a week to put together even the small posts b/c I can only work on the computer for a short time each day, and even that is while I am laying down. I am not writing this to gain pity or even sympathy, I just want to make sure that everyone gets a realistic picture of what having POTS and chronic fatigue syndrome is like, and not an image of a healthy person enjoyably typing away for their blog. This is a lot of work for me, and I have to give up many other activities (sketching, painting for short periods, etc) so that I can make entries and share information. But, it is worth it if I can help even one other person feel a little bit better during their fight with chronic illness or just make living a little bit easier for them.

So, along these lines, I wanted to write a few posts about the difficulties of dealing with an "invisible illness" and how it affects us, our caregivers, family and friends. I hope that it will be helpful to get a peek into the mind of a person with a chronic illness.