It’s hard to know where to even start with this update. The last few weeks have been unlike anything I’ve experienced in a very long time and pretty much everything I’ve been terrified of happening since March 2020. I do want to start by saying I am okay. I wouldn’t say I have fully recovered, but I am doing much better than I was and have complete confidence that I’ll make it to 100%, sooner rather than later, and without any long-term consequences. That said, four weeks ago, I got covid. And boy was it an experience. To be honest, and please pardon my language, but experience doesn't even do it justice. Absolute f*cking chaos is a much more accurate term.
Before I dive into the last few weeks, I feel like I need to take a moment to talk about how I got to where I am today and why I'm even writing this blog after such a long hiatus. For more than a decade, I shared my story and my life with chronic illness through a computer screen, with the hopes of both helping others, and finding much needed support through my struggles. Growing up with a chronic illness is hard. It’s isolating, for so many reasons. With CF, that isolation is amplified by the fact that we can’t have in-person support groups, because of the risk of sharing superbugs and making each other sicker. Instead, people in the cystic fibrosis community have turned to social media, eagerly and sometimes desperately seeking a connection with people who shared our burdens, seeking something that our “real life” family and friends simply couldn’t provide. Since high school, I’ve found solace and strength in being vulnerable with complete strangers. I’ve shared my fears and frustrations, my dreams and deepest desires. I took my passion for writing and used it connect with people all around the world, forging friendships that to this day, are some of the best I have. As a teenager, my reasons were more selfish than not. I’m a talker and my way of dealing with things is to just let it all out. Being able to vent to Facebook was a coping mechanism to try and manage all the stress that comes with this life and illness. I was in pain and angry. I was fatally ill and terrified. I needed to know it was going to be okay. I needed support and just encouragement through my daily fight against this disease.
As I got older though, I started to see the bigger picture. I started to see how deeply chronic illness affects people, how little the general public understands what it means to be chronically ill, and how broken our healthcare system is at times. I quickly realized how me being willing to talk about my experience could help others. I could help people feel like they weren’t alone while they were fighting their own battles — people who were feeling like I had just a few years earlier — and I could also help those who haven’t experienced adversity with their own health to understand a little better what their loved ones or peers who had might be feeling. By the time I was in college, I had a developed a passion for advocacy and doing everything I could to leave the chronic illness community better than it was when I first stepped into it.