Facing Autoimmunity Alone

I think I love Rocky because there are so many identifiable moments throughout the series between his fight and my own.  We both grew up poor.  We both grew up uneducated.  We both grew up knowing we were meant for one purpose.  And we both exhausted ourselves trying to accomplish our goals.  Though I never knew glory or fame, true love or immortalization in marble, and though I never got my title shot, I fought for it.  And when Rocky falls practically lifeless in Moscow to his knees, I felt it.  One of the most unbearable symptoms of most autoimmune conditions is chronic fatigue.  Let me break that down for you.  Chronic-persistent, continual, uninterrupted, unending.  Fatigue-exhaustion, extreme listlessness, bearing little to no energy, lethargy, burnout.  Still, all of the synonyms, definitions, descriptions under the sun can't prepare you for the depth of the feeling of actual fatigue.  Right now, the only t...

It's stunning what can be held within a day.  Moreso, even in three.  Everything changed.  From death to life, and back again.  Seventy two hours, I made plans to live.  Then lost it all.  At twenty four years old, I was living in my second apartment in Toledo, enjoying a lazy day, lying across my black leather couch, doing nothing but holding a cat.  Typical of me.  I felt a lump in my throat, seemed odd, because I hadn't been particularly sick lately, or felt as though I might be anytime soon.  No one around me had any complaints that led me to believe anything was going around either.  It was May, and though it was Toledo, we weren't buried alive in snow or feeling frighteningly frigid temperatures.  Well I was in graduate school, so I had insurance, I had a doctor on campus, and I had time.  Doctors are anything but tactful when it comes to breaking news to a patient.  Direct and to the point.  "Tiffany, we ne...

3 a.m. and here I am, awake, and dealing with an illness no one knows but me. At least that's how it feels. I'm reading through medical journals about treatments and driving myself mad over what is to come for me, knowing none of them can predict my future. The one thing I can tell you, that any dr can tell you, about scleroderma, every course runs a different route, so no ones race is the same. Hooray. I try hard not to be pessimistic about the whole thing; I have lived ... longer than some, and lived a better quality of life than a lot of the people I've met with the disease. This past fall at the gala in Columbus, I actually felt out of place. I was the only "patient" there you couldn't tell had the disease. Scleroderma is very visible; maybe that's why my most recent dr was so confused. Maybe that's why he gave me false hope. But the visible part I take with me, at home, every night behind closed doors. The restless nights, the coughs, ...