Welcome to the eleventh day of the National Health Blog Post Month Challenge hosted by WEGO Health. Every day during the month of November I will be writing a new blog post related to health and living with a chronic illness based on given prompts provided by WEGO Health.
Today’s prompt reads:
Veteran’s Day: For all our veterans and family members, we celebrate this day because it marks the end of WWI, at the 11th hour on the 11th day of the 11th month. Do you have a task you complete every day at the same time that helps with your chronic illness? How long have you been doing this, how has it helped?
I cannot say that I complete a task every day, at the same time which helps with my chronic illness. In my personal experience, no two days are exactly the same when living with a chronic illness. In addition, life with a chronic illness can instantly change within a blink of an eye; one minute the symptoms are in the background, calm…and the next minute they are wreaking havoc amongst your body and impacting upon your life and your routines. For example, very often the neurological condition that I live with causes such severe weakness in the legs and intense dizziness that I am unable to get out of bed, and even if I did have task that I complete every day at the same time, I could not very well leave my bed to complete the task.
Making plans, whilst living with a chronic illness can also prove be very difficult as because every day is so very different, we can never tell how we will feel on that particular day. Do we dare to book tickets for a concert or play just in case we are unable to attend? We are ruled by our bodies and as a result we are governed by our conditions and its symptoms; dizziness, pain, weakness or overwhelming fatigue may result in a person with a chronic illness to cancel plans, or cease our routines to rest and recuperate.
Recently, I have even been finding that the coping strategies that I do have in place regarding the dizziness, can work one day but as the intensity of the dizziness may be worse the next, these coping strategies are not proving to be effective. So, to conclude, living with chronic illness can vary from day-to-day; and even from hour to hour or in certain cases from minute to minute, and although we all would like little tasks and routines to complete every day to make us feel better, our illnesses can prevent us from completing them, ruining all of our plans and routines. Certainly, life with chronic illness is never the same from day-to-day….
At the end of this post, as it is Remembrance Day, I would like the opportunity to pay tribute to every member of the armed forces, past and present; all of their hard work and sacrifices that they make in serving our country and allowing us the freedom that we are so fortunate to have today. You are all heroes and we will remember all those from all the wars that were not so fortunate to return home to loved ones. I certainly will be wearing my poppy with pride today…
As always would love to hear your thoughts and views! Do you have any strict routines you adhere to when dealing with chronic illness? Does it help? Please leave comments below!
Comments
I can see how the amount of rigidity depends on what symptoms you deal with. For my diabetes, I find the more structured I am the better results I get in terms of both how I feel and how my numbers look. Sadly, these rigid routines sometimes take over my life and feed into my eating disorder. Recovery from the anorexia would greatly benefit from me letting go of routine. So there is a constant push/pull – what is good for one condition makes the other worse and on and on I go.
I’ve been following along your WEGO posts, by the way, and I am continually impressed and moved by your open and honest approach to sharing your experience.
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