I'm not feeling great. This sinus infection / head cold is still kicking me in the teeth. I've begun to get to where I am not dizzy when I'm upright and mobile. But I am in no condition to go visit anyone and I don't want to because I don't want to make them come down with this rotten thing. I'm on week two of this hellscape and I do not enjoy it.
Because I'm sick, I am having emotional flashbacks to being sick as a kid. It was a psychologically traumatic experience pretty much every time. As a result, I have massive guilt for not doing things like cleaning the apartment, being immaculately groomed, and doing the low impact stuff that doesn't suck up all my spoons (like writing this post). When I got sick as a kid, my parents kept telling me things like I wasn't really that sick and I was just trying to skip school. While school was a hellscape in its own way, it was my escape from the hellscape of home. I could do things like sit in study hall and play cards with a friend while being completely ignored by the study hall monitor. At home, if I wasn't doing school work then I had to be working on keeping the house clean. If I wasn't working on keeping the house clean, I was being lazy and that got verbal abuse heaped on me.
If I took medication for being sick, I was accused of abusing it to get high. Never mind the fact that I could have a sinus infection and be taking the minimal dose of Sudafed just so that I could breathe properly, my parents would still insist that I was trying to get high. That rhetoric as the constant background noise whenever I got sick instituted in me a deep sense of anxiety over my taking medications for any reason. When I was in college and I got put on birth control to keep me from developing ovarian cysts, my mother all but called me a slut and declared that I was going to be the most promiscuous woman on campus where I went to college. When I got put on antidepressants, my parents took it as a personal insult and told me to toughen up.
When I got bronchitus so bad that it was nearly penumonia, my parents made a point of making a long distance call to the college to bitch at me about being so irresponsible with my health and not coughing properly. Gods bless Stargazer, where ever she is now, she told them I was too sick to talk and hung up the phone. She convinced me that when I had a chance to get off my parents health insurance, I should do so as quickly as possible. She also convinced me to give my parents as little information about my health as necessary. Gods only know how my parents would have taken the information that I was in therapy through out college and for several years there after.
The only had a vague impression that I was seriously ill after college. I lost a job because I was having bad asthma attacks at work. They were so bad that I was taken by ambulance to the hospital at one point. I texted Beloved to let him know where I was going. The hospital still had my parents down as next of kin emergency contacts. So they called my parents. The three of them showed up at about the same time. My father looked distinctly annoyed. My mother was insisting that I had to will myself into breathing properly. Beloved was insisting that I focus on him instead of them and take my nebulizer treatment. Then a staff member of the hospital wheeled into the room with a mop and bucket of cleaner.
The fumes of the cleaner set off another asthma attack, the cleaner retreated asap to get a nurse. Mom kept telling me to treat it like I was back at their house when she and Grandma were processing pickles. If I had the breath, I would have screamed at her to get out of the room as the nurse set me up with a second nebulizer treatment. When it was time for the hospital to release me, Beloved firmly insisted he was going to bring me home and said that my parents should get my car from work. There was something about him that kept my parents from arguing. I think it was because he was furious and was holding back by force of will the urge to tear my parents heads off for their treating my asthma as theatrics while I was in the hospital being treated for it.
Two months later, I was looking for work and trying to maintain my health. And my parents kicked me out of the house. I was still having bad asthma problems. The following year was hellish but not as bad as it could have been because I wasn't under my parents' roof getting harassed for going to so many doctors to get answers as to why I wasn't breathing properly. I was finally off their health insurance and seeing someone other than the family doctor whose secretary was the biggest gossip in town. I wasn't in a good place financially. But because of it, I had medicaid and access to specialists that my parents would have refused to pay for. And the multiple trips to the ER because of asthma attacks were covered by the insurance. And I started therapy again to cope with all of the garbage going on in my brain at that time.
By the time I was moved back into my parents house, my lungs were stronger because I was on a medicine regime that helped open up the bronchial passages and I had been singing as physical therapy for my lungs. My parents accused me of being irresponsible again when they saw this medication. They tried to come up with excuses to take control of it. I told them that if they took my medication, that I needed to function, away, I was going to walk out of that house and they'd never see me again. So, it was just verbal harassment.
Here I am, shy of 20 years after that last altercation over my use of medication, and I still get anxious and suffer from emotional flashbacks over taking medication and being sick. I take around 12 pills a day to be upright and functional between the vitamins and the medications. I get so upset over it that Beloved has taken over the task of filling the pill sorter at the end of the week. I was just about crying over the fact that I have so many pills to take. I felt subhuman for it. Some days I still do. I hate being sick. I hate having multiple chronic illnesses. Just looking at the pills, I can hear my parents accusations and threats at the back of my head echoing. Nothing like being sick with the flu and having your parents threatening to institutionalize you for taking Theraflu more than once per day and you're a minor, so they could possibly do it.
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