The Time You Spend Waiting When You're Chronically Ill

There must be thousands of posts, blogs and vlogs out there, and if you’re anything like I was when first diagnosed, you would have read or working your way through most of them by now.

They talk of how your life will change, how many doctors appointments you will have and how your bedside cabinet will resemble a pharmacy shelf. The one thing they don’t tell you about, however, is the waiting! 

We constantly spend our life waiting, waiting in doctors offices, in hospital suites and in pharmacies. We wait for delivery of oxygen, of medication and of appointment letters. We even wait for medical bills!

In fact we could probably tell you about every leaflet and crack on our doctor’s waiting room wall and have read every magazine from front to back. Why do they never change those things over once in a while and get some fresh ones in for us poor sods that spend our lives waiting in here? We even know the name, age and occupation of the receptionist’s middle brother!

The worst of the waiting is definitely one that never gets acknowledged, and that is the waiting for our minds to accept and be comfortable with this new life of ours!

All the posts, blogs and vlogs tell us that this is a grieving process, that we will go through stages of anger, denial, sadness and acceptance.

So we wait…

Every day we wake up, open our eyes and wait to realize it was all a bad dream and we can rush to get ready and have breakfast and do all the things we did before.

Then we realize with every pain and nauseous feeling that it wasn’t and this is our life now.

We wait to see if our feelings have changed about it today, whether we have finally accepted this is our new normal. We wait for the feeling of joy in the little things and the appreciation of all what those sickly sweet positive posts, blogs and vlogs say that we should feel.

After all this waiting I can now tell you that I have become a more patient, calm and laid-back person.

Only kidding… I’m still waiting. But you never know, maybe one day. You will just have to wait… and see.

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