Please Don’t Call Me Pretty—

I’m Just Sick And 
Skinny: BUST True Story

This article brought tears to my eyes for two very conflicting reasons. The first is for being so jealous of a friend who was extremely skinny. I praised her for how great she looked and then she told me why she was so skinny. Many health issues. I instantly felt ashamed but there is no take back. But that is how demented really is. I was jealous of a woman who was I daily pain, constantly struggling and lives in chronic fatigue.

On the flip side of all of this, my illness has never lead me to the skinny and pretty, only to the fat and body shaming I do to myself. I don’t recognize myself anymore. In fact when I watched a recent video where I helped pull Gideon’s tooth I was utterly disgusted with how fat I looked and felt. Instead of seeing the joy on my face and the glee in his, my first thought was “was that really me and was I really that fat”.  To me I feel like blaming my chronic illness is a crutch.  But when it comes down to it my migraine triggers prevent me from exercising even swimming because of the angle my neck is at when I breath. I have been on so many drugs that all seem to have the same horrible side effect of weight gain. On days when I am in bed for days I don’t eat much and what I do eat is packaged, processed comfort foods as it will help make the pain go away. So I hate looking how I do, I try to avoid mirrors when possible and always trick the camera into making me look skinnier than I am. I try to accept myself but that is a most difficult thing to do in the society we live in.

In other words this really hit home hard tonight as I face a night of insomnia which will likely be followed by a day of sleep and fatigue.

Even as I read the comments I received on FB to this post it is still hard for me to see myself any other way than how I see myself in the mirror…unfortunately that does not stop the binge eating, it almost makes it worse.

I wonder how many others out there struggle with either side of this story: Skinny and pretty but sick or Fat and Ugly and judged but sick.  I do know I am not alone, but it makes it all the more difficult to deal with the challenges of being chronically ill with no true end in site.  Yes, I am going to Mayo Clinic, but there are no guarantees and no one can tell me how long I will have to live like this.  One of my friends who related to the story made sure that I make sure that Mayo helps me learn how to live my day to day life so that the depression, the eating, the pain doesn’t take me down the hole that can so often happen.  My solution lately is to take my abortive medication every day.  I am only supposed to take it 3 days a week, but if I did that I would live in bed most of my life.  Hoping to find something that will help me avoid taking the abortive medications everyday.  I believe I have taken either Amerge, Imitrex, Toradol or Benedryl every day since March 15th…but I have also had a migraine or a NDPH bad enough to need a medication almost every day (23 days).  Something has got to change!!!