It's amazing how when you aren't chronically ill how you take so many things for granted. Things like getting in and out of a bath, taking a shower, even toileting when your back is in spasm, bending forward to clean your teeth, standing at the kitchen sink, wiping benches in the kitchen, sweeping the floor or simply bending to pick something up....
Everything we do has to be measured up and spoons metered out before a task is actually done. It certainly impinges on our spontaneity. For us, there usually are lots of ramifications when we have tried to be spontaneous. Pain and more of it!..
Once when we went to bed, we would expect to go straight to sleep, have pleasant dreams and wake up refreshed. Now we often watch the clock go round, drift off if we are lucky and dream of pain as we toss and turn in our sleep, only to wake up feeling like a truck has hit us.
Once when we went to bed, we would expect to go straight to sleep, have pleasant dreams and wake up refreshed. Now we often watch the clock go round, drift off if we are lucky and dream of pain as we toss and turn in our sleep, only to wake up feeling like a truck has hit us.
Normals would probably view our hesitancy to do a task as procrastination or laziness, and before becoming a Sacrificial Home Keeper or chronically ill woman, I would have as well... but we simply are adapting to our new normal...
When our illness is invisible like fibromyalgia for instance, we just want to be respected and understood, but inevitably, we are judged. Especially so if we have become overweight because of illness... it is us who suffer from guilt (false guilt really) that unkind judges of our body put upon us. This invariably leads to depression and overeating in an effort to gain energy to move more, or simply for comfort.
I am just so glad that God knows exactly what is in our heart and understands. He knows our frame and we are loved unconditionally- and this is so comforting to us who only know scathing remarks and criticism in this fallen world we are travelling through on the path of illness.
© Glenys Robyn Hicks
The LORD will strengthen him on his bed of illness; You will sustain him on his sickbed. Psalm 41:3
