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In My Darkest Hour

Exploring Some of the Deepest Thought Processes Experienced Whilst Living With a Chronic Illness

By Titanium JenPublished 6 years ago 3 min read
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Natural instinct is to want to live forever, but not all of us feel that way. I can empathise with those who take their own lives or want the pain to go away. Depression and the feeling of hopelessness when living with a chronic illness are clearly different, but those feelings of emptiness and wishing the pain would go away can be incredibly harrowing to someone who wakes up every single day in pain.

Life seemed so bleak and pointless, my doctors were losing hope and I couldn’t help but feel the same. Days were long and I rarely had the energy or co-ordination to leave my bed. I often laid staring at the ceiling wishing for just one moment of relief from the agony I was in. It had taken years to get a diagnosis and now there was a tumour living in my brain and taking over my entire life.

These were the moments where I wanted it to end, and it’s a hard one to explain, hence the reason for writing this piece. I’m hoping just by reading this, a few more people will understand that ‘wish for it all to end’ far too many of us with chronic and life limiting conditions face.

I never wanted to actively end my life. I just stopped caring if things went wrong, I found myself less scared of growth before scans because frankly I didn’t care what was happening up there as long as somehow I ended up out of pain, the dizziness stopped and I wasn’t half the person I used to be anymore; even if that meant I wasn’t a person at all. These weren’t actively suicidal thoughts, and after discussions at support groups I wasn’t alone in this. It was a feeling common among the community of us, who frankly would have been put down by now if we were dogs, yet found ourselves dosed to the eyeballs with opiates and sedatives to keep us alive at a manageable level. What kind of a life is this, I thought to myself on a regular basis.

I spoke to my clinical specialist nurse about these thoughts, she said I was simply depressed and overwhelmed and prescribed me some pills. Of course, I felt no brighter. In hindsight I can see, I wasn’t depressed I was grieving for my old life and wishing for some pain-free normality. The extra pills made me feel worse with the added side effects.

I’m not saying no-one with chronic illnesses suffer from depression or mental health disorders because a large number of the population do… I’m trying to explain that sometimes when we say we don’t want to be alive, we mean we don’t want to be alive like this. We don’t want to ACTIVELY take our own lives, I was never on the verge of taking my own life.

I was just unlikely to stop myself falling over the edge of that verge if it naturally happened.

People with chronic illnesses like me cannot be strong all of the time, and at my hardest and most complex times, I couldn’t keep fighting every day. I didn’t have too. My feelings of grief and emptiness were valid, and soon lifted when I started to find light at the end of the tunnel and when eventually my symptoms of my tumour lifted enough so I could continue to work and see my friends. My grief lifted not because I’d come to terms with my loss, but because I was a lucky one who had part of herself that she thought had died in the process of diagnosis, return to life. Some people aren’t lucky enough to let that happen.

All I’m asking from this post is that a few more people understand how their friends and family are feeling. My advice to anyone who would be trying to support someone who felt like me is not to act differently. Go over and do all the things you used to do (within reason, obviously people’s abilities change with diagnosis) and just be there. Because in a time when people are grieving for a loved one, everyone rallies around them and in all honesty, from my experiences… Once the first month passes from diagnosis, those people disappear and only appear again at the sight of bad news. Show someone who’s suffering from a chronic illness that you care on their good days and not just their bad days because it could be the difference between them sitting all day, wishing they’d been born a pet who would have been put out his misery by now and having that much deserved smile on their face.

It's a simple step that can save someone’s sanity.

depression
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About the Creator

Titanium Jen

I’m a 23 year old aspiring writer, who writes a selection of work inspired by my personal experience as a Brain cancer patient as well as a selection of creative writing pieces! All money earnt from any views is for charity!

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