Status: Updated pretty much monthly.
Neuropathy
One
Illnesses are one of the scariest things on planet Earth. Sure, ghosts and spiders are creepy little things, but nothing can amount to the power of disease.
When you get sick, you shut down and turn off. Your body is drained from the world and you become antisocial for a while. You don’t talk to anyone; you don’t do anything—you’re stuck in one room in one position under one blanket for God knows how many days at a time. All this time, what are you doing? Lying down? Sleeping? Resting? Taking pills? Watching a movie? Reading? No matter what, it seems that you’re not fighting the war—you versus pathogen. All you’re doing is sitting around, waiting for that miracle moment when everything seems magically better.
That’s the worst part of being sick—waiting. When you’re at home resting, there’s nothing you can do but set yourself up somewhere and completely stop everything. From there, it seems like it’s just up to your body—your blood, lymphatic system, and all the other gory details of immunity—to fight off the enemy. You can’t actually go in and pull the germs out yourself, so you have to trust that the job will be taken care of. This trust that you put in is absolute; you don’t have a choice. The entire time you just feel like you’re doing nothing, and actually, you are. You’re not fighting; you’re not working. You’re unproductive and you know it. All you can do is sit there and pray to God that your body does its job. You don’t know what the outcome will be; you’re always in suspense. It’s almost like watching a sports game. You can’t actually go in and make your team any better than its own abilities during the match. You can sit there and cheer it on, but you can’t help. You’re idle and waiting. Waiting, waiting, waiting.
Germs move quicker than wild fires. They’re always traveling, always moving, getting deeper and deeper into your soul as we speak. It’s a scary thought, really, just how the pathogen gets around. Just think about it—the pathogen, a living thing, gets into your body, whether it be through a cut or a sip off your best friend’s water bottle, and enters your life. From there, it finds its way to the blood and then poof—it has access to every part of you. It can crawl around under your skin and bury itself in the walls of your veins. It can get into your stomach, lungs, heart, and eventually, your brain. It’s like a worm, wiggling through a complicated system of tunnels, mapping out a route and invading something that isn’t their own. The thought of something slithering around where you can’t see it is enough to make your skin crawl and twitch.
The fact that they can come from anywhere and everywhere is alarming. You never know what’s safe and what’s not. Your best friend can give it to you as can your worst enemy. Your favorite bookshop, café, school, work, the bus in town, and even your own bedroom holds millions of trillions of little bacteria squirming around just waiting to thrive inside a living being. No matter how much your teachers and nurses would harp on you the importance of washing your hands, there really is no way to completely avoid germs unless you decide to become a “Bubble-Child” and shut yourself off from the world.
Perhaps the most disturbing part of an illness is in its design and the way it works. Sicknesses are notorious for sneak attacks. First, the pathogen will enter your body and sit there for a while, multiplying and strengthening its army—expanding throughout the battlefield to do as much damage as possible. During this time, you don’t have any idea the damage that is about to be done and the fight that’s like a time bomb, waiting until the right moment when your body’s defenses are the most weakened. By design, the invader knows to attack at its enemy when it’s the most helpless and powerless. Then, once you realize that you’ve been infected, it’s too late. The infection has spread all throughout that you’ll be scrambling to find your own weapons to fight it with.
Illnesses do as much physical damage as they do mental. When it comes to being sick, only you know what’s real and what’s not. No one else can feel the pressure on your skull that you’ve been complaining about all day. Your mother isn’t going to feel any pain just because you do; your roommate won’t experience your headache in the same moment as you—neither of them, nor anyone else, can be certain of what your pain actually is. Because of this, it’s up to you as a sane human being to decide if you’re really sick or if you’re imagining it. When someone decides to challenge this, though, your world comes crashing down. It’s like saying that every time you close your eyes, you see the color purple, then someone comes up and tells you that’s stupid—you can only see black. Neither side can actually prove their case anymore. It’s one word against another; you’re at a stalemate. When people begin taking sides, the real uncertainly starts setting in. There is so much influence upon hearing the same thing over and over again.
If person after person tells you time and time again that you’re crazy and that everything is in your head, would you believe it?
For me, Sadie Rose Hoff, it wasn’t a choice. I was delusional.
When you get sick, you shut down and turn off. Your body is drained from the world and you become antisocial for a while. You don’t talk to anyone; you don’t do anything—you’re stuck in one room in one position under one blanket for God knows how many days at a time. All this time, what are you doing? Lying down? Sleeping? Resting? Taking pills? Watching a movie? Reading? No matter what, it seems that you’re not fighting the war—you versus pathogen. All you’re doing is sitting around, waiting for that miracle moment when everything seems magically better.
That’s the worst part of being sick—waiting. When you’re at home resting, there’s nothing you can do but set yourself up somewhere and completely stop everything. From there, it seems like it’s just up to your body—your blood, lymphatic system, and all the other gory details of immunity—to fight off the enemy. You can’t actually go in and pull the germs out yourself, so you have to trust that the job will be taken care of. This trust that you put in is absolute; you don’t have a choice. The entire time you just feel like you’re doing nothing, and actually, you are. You’re not fighting; you’re not working. You’re unproductive and you know it. All you can do is sit there and pray to God that your body does its job. You don’t know what the outcome will be; you’re always in suspense. It’s almost like watching a sports game. You can’t actually go in and make your team any better than its own abilities during the match. You can sit there and cheer it on, but you can’t help. You’re idle and waiting. Waiting, waiting, waiting.
Germs move quicker than wild fires. They’re always traveling, always moving, getting deeper and deeper into your soul as we speak. It’s a scary thought, really, just how the pathogen gets around. Just think about it—the pathogen, a living thing, gets into your body, whether it be through a cut or a sip off your best friend’s water bottle, and enters your life. From there, it finds its way to the blood and then poof—it has access to every part of you. It can crawl around under your skin and bury itself in the walls of your veins. It can get into your stomach, lungs, heart, and eventually, your brain. It’s like a worm, wiggling through a complicated system of tunnels, mapping out a route and invading something that isn’t their own. The thought of something slithering around where you can’t see it is enough to make your skin crawl and twitch.
The fact that they can come from anywhere and everywhere is alarming. You never know what’s safe and what’s not. Your best friend can give it to you as can your worst enemy. Your favorite bookshop, café, school, work, the bus in town, and even your own bedroom holds millions of trillions of little bacteria squirming around just waiting to thrive inside a living being. No matter how much your teachers and nurses would harp on you the importance of washing your hands, there really is no way to completely avoid germs unless you decide to become a “Bubble-Child” and shut yourself off from the world.
Perhaps the most disturbing part of an illness is in its design and the way it works. Sicknesses are notorious for sneak attacks. First, the pathogen will enter your body and sit there for a while, multiplying and strengthening its army—expanding throughout the battlefield to do as much damage as possible. During this time, you don’t have any idea the damage that is about to be done and the fight that’s like a time bomb, waiting until the right moment when your body’s defenses are the most weakened. By design, the invader knows to attack at its enemy when it’s the most helpless and powerless. Then, once you realize that you’ve been infected, it’s too late. The infection has spread all throughout that you’ll be scrambling to find your own weapons to fight it with.
Illnesses do as much physical damage as they do mental. When it comes to being sick, only you know what’s real and what’s not. No one else can feel the pressure on your skull that you’ve been complaining about all day. Your mother isn’t going to feel any pain just because you do; your roommate won’t experience your headache in the same moment as you—neither of them, nor anyone else, can be certain of what your pain actually is. Because of this, it’s up to you as a sane human being to decide if you’re really sick or if you’re imagining it. When someone decides to challenge this, though, your world comes crashing down. It’s like saying that every time you close your eyes, you see the color purple, then someone comes up and tells you that’s stupid—you can only see black. Neither side can actually prove their case anymore. It’s one word against another; you’re at a stalemate. When people begin taking sides, the real uncertainly starts setting in. There is so much influence upon hearing the same thing over and over again.
If person after person tells you time and time again that you’re crazy and that everything is in your head, would you believe it?
For me, Sadie Rose Hoff, it wasn’t a choice. I was delusional.
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Yay! I think I'm going to update about once a month, that way I have alot of time in between to write ahead on a Word Document.Thank you so much for everyone who commented on the intro!!
Comments make me very happy :D