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Moving Beyond the Shame of Chronic Illness
How falling in love with my “new” brain made all the difference after a life-changing and ultimately life-affirming concussion.
Originally Published in The Mighty and Yahoo
Even though I spent most of my career throughout my 20s and 30s working in home health and hospice, I wasn’t able to grasp the reality of living with chronic illness until it happened to me. While this is true for many things in life, it is particularly applicable to those of us that live in a constant state of discomfort, pain, and/or disability because of a disease that cannot simply be “fixed.” We struggle to find physicians that are patient enough to treat us, friends that are willing to stand with us during the ups and the downs, and employers that can accommodate our limitations.
And that is just the beginning…
Prior to the traumatic brain injury that changed my life in 2011, I had the same “acute mindset” that frustrates me these days. In other words, you have an episode, you go to the doctor, you fix it, and you recover. Most people can’t imagine a paradigm different from this.
People asked me after the TBI, “What is your recovery timeline? When are you going to be back to normal?”
