this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2025
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Chronic Illness

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A community/support group for chronically ill people. While anyone is welcome, our number one priority is keeping this a safe space for chronically ill people.

This is a support group, not a place for healthy people to share their opinions on disability.

Rules

  1. Be excellent to each other

  2. Absolutely no ableism. This includes harmful stereotypes: lazy/freeloaders etc

  3. No quackery. Does an up-to date major review in a big journal or a major government guideline come to the conclusion you’re claiming is fact? No? Then don’t claim it’s fact. This applies to potential treatments and disease mechanisms.

  4. No denialism or minimisation This applies challenges faced by chronically ill people.

  5. No psychosomatising psychosomatisation is a tool used by insurance companies and governments to blame physical illnesses on mental problems, and thereby saving money by not paying benefits. There is no concrete proof psychosomatic or functional disease exists with the vast majority of historical diagnoses turning out to be biomedical illnesses medicine has not discovered yet. Psychosomatics is rooted in misogyny, and consisted up until very recently of blaming women’s health complaints on “hysteria”.

  6. Respect the Group’s Purpose. It’s a support forum for people with chronic illness to vent and share and talk together. It’s not a place for healthy people to come and give their opinions.

Did your post/comment get removed? Before arguing with moderators consider that the goal of this community is to provide a safe space for people suffering from chronic illness. Moderation may be heavy handed at times. If you don’t like that, find or create another community that prioritises something else.

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I know this comic has already been posted on lemmy. But it's the only way that I feel captures my feeling, it's like I live on an unspecified timer, everyday, after that I go back to the can.

There's the constant pain, the lack of sleep and/or quality of sleep, waking up everyday like you've been run over by a train.

Then there's the extra sensitivity, and the "electricity", every time I sweat I feel an electric shock in my body. At many points, it feels like an active electric current is being run through my body, like I'm strapped to one of them electric execution chairs.

Then there are the constant brain fog/headaches, no matter what I seem to do, half of my brain is preoccupied with pain in random areas. My brain is like "Hey wassup, I know you're trying to focus,, or sleep, but your left leg is in a g o n y, because no reason really, maybe you moved too much. And so you have exceeded your uhhh free trial of leg for today."

Depression comes in play too, either because I don't go out much because of the pain, or because of the lack of sleep. And then depression fuels anxiety, and they fuel each other, and we have kick started our "mental doom engine."

Then there's the sleep. I have school coming up, it is absolutely necessary that I stick to a schedule, except that won't happen. Because the only way for me to fall asleep, is to be at that point when you're so sleep deprived that you can't keep your eyes open. I have tried at many points to use this my advantage, but it seems like this point is almost always at 5 or 6 AM.

I have abandoned traditional art, and almost anything that involves the use of arms. I can type on the keyboard pretty comfortably because it requires only my wrists and fingers, but even that starts to hurt after a while.

And lastly, it is almost treated as an invisible disability. "Your limbs don't seem to be broken/swelling", "You're not using crutches", "You're not on a wheelchair", and "Fibro my what?". I have been using sticks/staves/brooms in many situations to get up and move, and I use whatever object I can grab and get up with.

Since I grunt all the time, move slowly, use long objects all the time, I have always joked that I feel like an old person. As I'm writing this, my old person knee is acting up for no reason whatsoever, it just likes to be silly at times (night).

Tl;Dr: The comic I posted, I guess.

Thank you for reading.

EDIT

The good ending. All of the responses were to my surprise, overwhelmingly positive! I thank everyone who has commented with their own insights, I learned a lot, remembered a lot, and discovered a lot of things that would help me manage my pain. Thank you all, I wish you all the best of luck

An illustration of a cat wearing funny clothes and hat, while carrying a stringed instrument with 3 strings

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[–] replicator@sh.itjust.works 3 points 3 weeks ago

Omg thank you so much. I disregarded their "info" because clearly this person didn't know me (or the condition) enough to make all of those assumptions and accusations. Thank you so much!