Practicing Self-Care with Chronic Illness


"I’ve always been really bad at taking care of myself. My body might have had opinions about limits, but I was firmly of the belief that transcending them was just a matter of applying some elbow grease and willpower.

 Perhaps not surprisingly, my body regularly took revenge. I lost track of how many times it forced me to stay very still for a week or more, while it healed the damage caused by my stubbornness. But still I persisted…until a big flare of my rheumatoid arthritis. This flare made me so weak that I couldn’t do much more than just get through the day. Only after looking into the abyss did I begin to think about changing my approach.

These days, I see my body as my best friend, rather than an obstacle. After all, my body gets me through each day, helping me to live my life to the best of my ability. And like any friend, it deserves care."

Read the rest of the self-care post on the Mango Health blog.
 
  

Comments

Rick Phillips said…
Lene:

I have spent so much time shooting myself over how I feel I ran out of bullets. At first, I was puzzled about these new feelings when I stopped. Then, I started to like it. hey who knew?

9:21 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Farber’s Disease: Could Your Child’s Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis Be Misdiagnosed?

Image
Joint inflammation or contractures. Nodules (small lumps under the skin or in other tissues). A weakened or hoarse voice. Children with these symptoms may have been diagnosed with juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA) or other types of juvenile arthritis . But do they actually have JIA or do they have Farber’s disease? An equine digression When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras. This is an adage in the medical world that encourages doctors to not wander off exploring rare and esoteric reasons for a patient’s symptoms. Because most of the time, that hoof beat of a rash likely isn’t the plague, the joint pain more likely a type of arthritis than the bends (especially if the person has never scuba dived) and you get the picture. But once in a while, it actually is a zebra. And even if it’s first identified as a horse, eventually, the stripes come through. It took five years of my parents running around to different doctors before one finally recognized that I had
Read more

13 Things to Know for Rheumatoid Arthritis Newbies + Facebook Live

Image
Getting a diagnosis of any type of chronic illness can throw you for loop. There is so much to know and you have so little energy. My new slideshow for HealthCentral collects 13 things you need to know as an RA newbie : "Receiving a diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a moment of strange duality. On one hand, you may be relieved to finally have answers for the symptoms you’ve been experiencing. On the other, it can be incredibly overwhelming to find out you have a chronic illness. Wrapping your head around all the new factors RA brings into your life is a long-term process. Here are some of the things you need to know." See the slideshow on HealthCentral . And in case you missed it, here is the Facebook Live I did yesterday talking about this topic:   
Read more