When your support system fails you.

Chronic Illness is terrifying and traumatic for the person who has it, but apparently it is as equally traumatic for our support system and results in many of them not being able to cope and disappearing on us.
I suffered for many months alone before someone contacted me to offer support. In this time I experienced many traumatic things on my illness journey, things that would have been good to talk to with family and friends. I didn’t have a support network back in my early days of illness, and nobody should have to face it alone. So please, if you are newly ill or experiencing hardship, please reach out to someone if you are unable to talk to friends or family.

I should have reached out to a therapist a year ago, but instead I battled alone and held in all of this pain and suffering from the dramatic lifehange. I sat back hoping that my closest friends and family would be there to support me, but it took months before they did, and not all of then ended up by my side.

An incident happened today which has prompted me to ask the question below. I had a very close friend of close to nine years who has silenced me since getting ill. She became busy, didn’t have time, didn’t care. So, I (right or wrongfully) approached her and let out my feelings of disappointment and let down, as I have learnt not to hold onto feelings and let them eat at you, and it escalated into the usual hurtful comments about my illness, Facebook delete and the good old’ “don’t message me again”.

What is one of the inconsiderate, uncalled for (and possibly downright nasty) things that your supposed friends, loved ones or Doctors/Specialists have said to you along your Chronic Illness journey?
Please share below.

We are dealing with so much in our lives already, but society assumes that we are; exaggerating or weak, which results in having a bunch of these idiots throwing their opinions and ideals into our lives, telling us how to live and what is right and wrong.

I was told that my illness has indeed defined the person I am today, and that I also need to be better than the illness and not weak; that I use the Illness Card as a victim card.

See, this is what is wrong with society ^

And this was coming from someone who I have spent a lifetime with and who was meant to care for me.

Take a walk in our shoes and then tell me how you feel. You unfortunately lose a piece of yourself to your illness but that does not mean that you don’t try your absolute hardest every day, even though you might miss lunch with a friend, or a birthday, or work. It is NOT an excuse or an “illness card”. It is the way it is. You/we are doing the best we can, under the circumstances that we are in, and we shouldn’t be quiet about it.
And it is a shame that the people who surprise us the most are those within our support group. They don’t seem to understand how hard it is for us to struggle each day, and they expect us to get up and just face the world with open arms like they are able to. If only they had a glimpse of what this feels like, and the loneliness surrounding hardship, so they would understand entirely. Then I am certain that they would think before spitting out the harsh comments.

I have received it from Specialists before, but not from people who are meant to be apart of my support network, to which I received today.

We don’t deserve treatment like this. We deserve respect, and if we sit in silence we will not be heard.

Stand up for yourself and know that you deserve better, whether it’s a smartass Specialist, a disrespectful friend or even a family member who thinks they know your body more than you do.

Protect yourself first because I assure you nobody else will.